I see, thanks for replying and no worries! yeap some of the "self-describing" formats like msgpack, cbor etc will because of how fq works have to be decoded into something more of a meta-msgpack etc.

About blobs, if you want to change how (possibly large) binaries are represented as JSON you can use the bits_format options, see https://github.com/wader/fq/blob/master/doc/usage.md#options, so fq -o bits_format=md5 torepr ...

I can highly recommend to learn jq, it's what makes fq really useful, and as a bonus you will learn jq in general! :)