@@technologyclub6870 I'm using it to solve a CTF challenge.. we have to decode a QR code that has solid color polygons on top CTF in Computer Security (en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Capture_the_flag)
I don't ever comment on videos. But I have to thank you for this. This was awesome. I can imagine the time it took to create all of these graphics, and want to thank you for your efforts. This is exactly the kind of thing I love to find online.
@@leskerwint2607 because maybe there are people who find this useful and the guy who made the video used it's time for helping that people and making it easy to understand.
Dude I've been looking everywhere on youtube a video explaining how QR codes work, and they all say "How a QR code WORKS" but all they do is explain what they are and how to download an app to install it (aka bullshit title). Now that I've watched your video I can see why there are no videos explaining this shit, it's so complicated. Thank you so much for uploading this, I can see it's hard even for you to explain it. Also I'm subscribing.
I just saw a short program about the Japanese guy who developed the QR code but they didn't say anything about how it worked. Your use of an Excel spreadsheet was pure genius and actually made it understandable. Now I want to read the Wikipedia article to learn more details. Thanks for producing this video. It was both entertaining and informative.
I'm not sure why you stopped putting up videos, but this here is an absolute work of art! Thank you so much for giving us such a thorough video! Well done and hope to see more from you in the future.
hey. I woke up with the obsessive idea to reverse engineer/decode a QR code. I couldn't thank you more for making this video, such a great amount of work, and purely explained. thank you very much
Nice video. However it is much simpler and faster to find the characters in the ASCII table if you convert the block pattern direct to the octal values (i.e. no adding up is needed!). For example, your lower case "s" at 18m48s is the bit pattern 01_110_011 where I have separated the pattern into the 2 and 2/3 octal characters with underscores. With a few minutes practice you can just read that off as the octal number 163. Now look over to your ASCII table and there you see the octal number 163 next to the lower case "s". No sums required! There are only 7 octal patterns to remember and you can then translate any number of bits to octal or just do the mental adding up of the 4 plus 2 plus 1 bit values for each character in your head.
Thank you so much for this tutorial. I'd been searching for this info the whole day until I got to you and not only did you make black dots understandable, but I was laughing the entire time. Keep them coming! :)
I've seen a few vids about this, but this was by far and a way the best of those videos. Thank you. Just made one completely by scratch from this, and then compared it to one made online by qrstuff website. and they are similar! though theirs seemed slightly different at first, so i now realized why, I had my ascii wrong for one of the bytes. Thanks mate!
Thanks for doing these videos! These are great. The Wikipedia articles never seemed enough to make these encodings clear to me. Could you do one on Micro QR or Mini QR? I've seen codes which only have one targeting square in one corner. How do those work?
A bit (or 2 or 3 ...) complex for a tech illiterate like me, but I do know a bit about QR codes or know what one looks like and often wondered how they work. This well explained video on a complex technical topic gave me the sort of general idea of how they encode their information. That is all I wanted as a curious lay person. Thank you.
This is genius. Both your great video/explanation AND the elegant, amazing invention and logic of the QR code itself! Thank you sir. Nice work!:) danke from Germany!
Thank you for taking the time to explain this to mere mortals. I never dreamed one could actually decode these things "by hand" as you say. The explanation of what QR codes contain makes them less annoying somehow and I would never have the patience to read the Wikipedia page on the subject. Please stop and smell the roses (or do something else outside) to treat yourself!
Thanks for the detailed explanation. I will of course use an app to create qr codes, but i always wondered how it worked and now i learnt. By the way, how many did you spend to create that excel file? :)
I understood the whole thing, but if I paint my own Code, it doesn`t look the same way, the generator does it in the right corner (just where I know, how to write letters in)
Ok I understand the part when you were removing the black squares into white but I got lost on how you got the numbers to each square so you can add up to find the letter.
fwiw you can decode letters without looking up the ascii chart. Ascii capital letters are (64 + letter's place in the alphabet), ascii lowercase are (64 + 32 + letter's place in the alphabet). For example 98 is ascii for "b" because 98 = 64 + 32 + 2, and b is the second letter of the alphabet
is the QR code found in PepsiPXP promo Pepsi diet cans a valid QR code? coz when i tried to scan it with the Neo Reader it's not reading the code... then i noticed that the codes are not in square but in dots...
5:34 I'm pretty sure that's wrong, the lines start from the top, where the first row is an even row. Check the wikipedia example image with the wikipedia url, where you can see that in the middle top section, the top line is inverted.
It's about Finder patterns and timing patterns and orientation patterns. Then, byte tile shapes and layout pattern, and masks. Then there's error correction! Error control coding. BCH codes for bit error correction (format information only), Reed Solomon codes for symbol error correction.
Great stuff....... I especially enjoyed the definitions of the marks and coding types around the three corners. With the inverting of every other line, this tells me more about it. But I now see there are several ways of encoding those characters, and although I know the standard ASCII HEX codes for all letters and digits by heart, if I don't detect the proper encoding type first, the rest will be garbage. But very well done.
Does anyone know of any features a code might have that would prevent me from being able to decode it by hand? Some of the values I am getting don't make any sense...and I'm quite sure that the mistake is not in my method, but that there is some sort of double masking or something. Has anyone ever heard of something like this?
I have a doubt wat to do in interleaved blocks, in some qr codes there are mall cubical blocks in between also,wat to do in those cases? how to find encryption code there? please help
Thanks for sharing this knowledge with us. I have been looking for an understandable method for awhile. Your explanation is the easiest to follow. I will be trying it out on a code I found that I believe unlocks something special. Perhaps I will ask your opinion, as well. Thanks again.
There's one error in this video. When you apply the masking, the purple fixed patterns weren't skipped over. They were merely ignored. In other words, for this specific qr code, the grey lines should start from the first line (0th line), and then the third, the fifth (skipped cuz it's fixed pattern), and seventh and so forth.
I always thought a QR code had some internet magic in it and that something had to be activated for it to be read. Never realized it's basically just information written in another language.
It's a method of data storage. If you could see what sectors look like magnetically on your hdd it also has a strange appearance. Computers aren't great with image recognition so we store data as simple for them as possible. What looks easy for us is tough for a computer and what is simple for a computer is tough for us. We aren't the same. Nothing to do with religion we just need a way to talk to them quickly. Our interface with machines is a huge limiting factor we are always trying to make it easier. We have a bandwidth limitation that is done by either scanning things or slowly punching stuff in with our fingers. Nowadays talking sometimes. It's all just way to store and talk to a machine it's nothing to worry about you are educating yourself on them though and that's good hopefully the fear of them has relaxed a bit and you understand more of how they work and what they do. It's just a piece of paper or sticker with the ability to help communicate with your computer to make lives easier. You are doing right though by investigating and learning about them.
The first little bit, as you called it, is actually an encoding nibble, as it is half a byte. Along the same lines, two bytes is equal to a sandwich. Programmers are hungry people, so you will find a lot of hardware and software named after food.
Hi! I exported my accounts from Google Authenticator, but the QR code is too complex and will not be scanned by the phone. What is the solution? Would a good camera like an iphone be able to scan? Or is it possible to decode manually?
I don't think you're supposed to ignore that row of timing patterns when you damasking the code. On my own attempt that has caused all the boxes above it to be the inversion of what they should be, also the example on wiki implies that its the first layer that is inverted.
Наука
When you're that one guy that is watching this for fun, and not for any work related reasons.
Who dafaq needs this for work 😂
im doing this for writing F*ck you
I have run out of things to do during quarantine lmao
@@technologyclub6870 I'm using it to solve a CTF challenge.. we have to decode a QR code that has solid color polygons on top
CTF in Computer Security (en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Capture_the_flag)
@@ndanilo wow that seems interesting
I don't ever comment on videos. But I have to thank you for this. This was awesome. I can imagine the time it took to create all of these graphics, and want to thank you for your efforts. This is exactly the kind of thing I love to find online.
Upvote :D
Why?
@@leskerwint2607 because maybe there are people who find this useful and the guy who made the video used it's time for helping that people and making it easy to understand.
a
Someone make a vacation QR puzzle book.
Would be terribly hard but fun. (For the real nerds)
What? A puzzle book where you debug by hand and see what the code is?
yeah
the solution of the code of course is
_You are aboslutely no-life_
Mistory Minecraft It's funny you say that because you play minecraft.
Oh, but it is not no-life.
Responding to this comment actually is...
Mistory Minecraft I would totally do that. Also I have no life.
This guy is AMAZING! He takes something VERY complex, and makes it understandable. Thank you so much.
Dude I've been looking everywhere on youtube a video explaining how QR codes work, and they all say "How a QR code WORKS" but all they do is explain what they are and how to download an app to install it (aka bullshit title). Now that I've watched your video I can see why there are no videos explaining this shit, it's so complicated. Thank you so much for uploading this, I can see it's hard even for you to explain it. Also I'm subscribing.
lmao u dont know how to search properly thats why,
I just saw a short program about the Japanese guy who developed the QR code but they didn't say anything about how it worked. Your use of an Excel spreadsheet was pure genius and actually made it understandable. Now I want to read the Wikipedia article to learn more details. Thanks for producing this video. It was both entertaining and informative.
I'm not sure why you stopped putting up videos, but this here is an absolute work of art! Thank you so much for giving us such a thorough video! Well done and hope to see more from you in the future.
still such an awesome video even in 2024 thank u bro
I just implemented a barcode API in an app! Then I was curious about how exactly it works! And here I'm right now!
I know I am never gonna do this but it was nice to see someone explained it very well which was mystery for me for few years
This is probably something that a human can not even fully learn, no matter how much practice he takes on it.
This is what true content looks like. THANK YOU. Perfectly done.
hey. I woke up with the obsessive idea to reverse engineer/decode a QR code. I couldn't thank you more for making this video, such a great amount of work, and purely explained. thank you very much
Nice video. However it is much simpler and faster to find the characters in the ASCII table if you convert the block pattern direct to the octal values (i.e. no adding up is needed!). For example, your lower case "s" at 18m48s is the bit pattern 01_110_011 where I have separated the pattern into the 2 and 2/3 octal characters with underscores. With a few minutes practice you can just read that off as the octal number 163. Now look over to your ASCII table and there you see the octal number 163 next to the lower case "s". No sums required! There are only 7 octal patterns to remember and you can then translate any number of bits to octal or just do the mental adding up of the 4 plus 2 plus 1 bit values for each character in your head.
Good idea!
Great idea but also , NERD!
This is the best video explaining qr code I have seen so far. Thank you.
Thank you so much for this tutorial. I'd been searching for this info the whole day until I got to you and not only did you make black dots understandable, but I was laughing the entire time. Keep them coming! :)
This is phenomenally well explained, even if it is waaaaay more complicated than it looks
This was very enjoyable, I have no real grasp on data, programming or anything other than breaking data for glitch art, but this was really fun.
I like how you keep saying "don't be scared". Great video. thanks.
Thank you for your efforts, you just made me a little bit more smarter.
More smarter? Quick, get thee to a grammar video!
@@johnnations5932 AHAHAHAHAHAHAH
Who knew Kermit the Frog knew about QR codes!! ... ;) Thanks for the info, great vid.
haha
rude
@@weltmeister but funny nonetheless XD
Dab
Could make an entire kid's show out of "Muppets teaching"
This is the crazy man’s sudoku😂
Incredibly detailed video. Deserves a medal:)
I've seen a few vids about this, but this was by far and a way the best of those videos. Thank you. Just made one completely by scratch from this, and then compared it to one made online by qrstuff website. and they are similar! though theirs seemed slightly different at first, so i now realized why, I had my ascii wrong for one of the bytes. Thanks mate!
Thanks for doing these videos! These are great. The Wikipedia articles never seemed enough to make these encodings clear to me.
Could you do one on Micro QR or Mini QR? I've seen codes which only have one targeting square in one corner. How do those work?
watching this 10yrs later, AMAZING
Another wonderful application of an ASCII table. I'll have to pass this along to my intro to programming students. Thank you so much. :D
A bit (or 2 or 3 ...) complex for a tech illiterate like me, but I do know a bit about QR codes or know what one looks like and often wondered how they work. This well explained video on a complex technical topic gave me the sort of general idea of how they encode their information. That is all I wanted as a curious lay person. Thank you.
This is genius. Both your great video/explanation AND the elegant, amazing invention and logic of the QR code itself! Thank you sir. Nice work!:) danke from Germany!
Seriously you are amazing, you made it so simple.
After I watched your video I feel overflow in my head. You are very good decoder person. I like this clip video very much.
you upload the spredsheet?
Thank you so much for this clear and detailed explanation! Appreciate the effort and time you spent in doing it!
I wonder if one was to manipulate the boxes by drawing in black squares in accordingly. Could we then have changed the word?
Great video!
This is god level , definitely subscribing you. I am watching this video after 10 years since it was created but it is still relevent.
Today I was thinking I wanna learn to read qr code and well now I'm here
Witty and fun to watch. Great stuff mate!
hey, that's pretty impressive. Thank you! was looking for something like this.
One hell of a hassle! You're a trooper. Masking patterns seem unnecessary to me, but the rest of the code makes more sense now. Thanks!
Thank you for taking the time to explain this to mere mortals. I never dreamed one could actually decode these things "by hand" as you say. The explanation of what QR codes contain makes them less annoying somehow and I would never have the patience to read the Wikipedia page on the subject. Please stop and smell the roses (or do something else outside) to treat yourself!
Thank you for the great video. What program did you use to create your QR code in the first place?
Hi, Hank Green just sent me here. Its actually really interesting video. Thank you
I started a thread about that above.
That's not a thread fucktard.
Ddday14 Have nice day. :)
After having seen how to decode a MIDI file, this seems easier to me now
Hey man I got a puzzle for you. Can you help me solve it?
@@casa8017 yeah you are 4 years late
Yes
Hi! Congrats for the video! You explained very well a very complicated issue that nowadays became a regular stuff! 👏👏Keep up the good work! 🙏🙏
Great video after I learn it I can figure out rickrolls or unexpected jump scares
I can realize how much time it took to make it.. Really appreciate it!🔥
You are a genius. That was fun and easy to understand
My mind exploded
Thanks for the detailed explanation. I will of course use an app to create qr codes, but i always wondered how it worked and now i learnt.
By the way, how many did you spend to create that excel file? :)
Do you know what a motor is? Manual vs automatic? Winter tires?
I understood the whole thing, but if I paint my own Code, it doesn`t look the same way, the generator does it in the right corner (just where I know, how to write letters in)
One really nice tutorial. Thank You!
Awesome explanation, do you happen to have the excel sheet available online as well?
That was great! Thank you for your explanation.
Cool video, very helpful and also presented in a entertaining way.
Wow thanks for this! Was curious how a QR code read information
In the future: A QR code inside of a QR that's inside of many more QR codes!
r/ModusOperandi sent me here. Incredibly interesting stuff.
Qr coeds for otakus
How did you put the QR code into the excel? is there a way to put it onto a google spreadsheet? i dont have excel.
Ok I understand the part when you were removing the black squares into white but I got lost on how you got the numbers to each square so you can add up to find the letter.
You're not kidding about the error correction. The maths... oh my fudge, so beyond me.
Pretty informative video, thank you
fwiw you can decode letters without looking up the ascii chart. Ascii capital letters are (64 + letter's place in the alphabet), ascii lowercase are (64 + 32 + letter's place in the alphabet). For example 98 is ascii for "b" because 98 = 64 + 32 + 2, and b is the second letter of the alphabet
I was randomly thinking about this in the shower. You never known when this knowledge might prove useful....
is the QR code found in PepsiPXP promo Pepsi diet cans a valid QR code? coz when i tried to scan it with the Neo Reader it's not reading the code... then i noticed that the codes are not in square but in dots...
Fantastic... You made the horrifying QR code look easy... amazing video.
is the a way to decode a qr version 20? I'm trying to find any website online for it but still nothing
5:34 I'm pretty sure that's wrong, the lines start from the top, where the first row is an even row. Check the wikipedia example image with the wikipedia url, where you can see that in the middle top section, the top line is inverted.
this kind of tutorial I was looking for
It's about Finder patterns and timing patterns and orientation patterns. Then, byte tile shapes and layout pattern, and masks. Then there's error correction! Error control coding. BCH codes for bit error correction (format information only), Reed Solomon codes for symbol error correction.
Finally, I can play The Talos Principle without needing a phone.
so touching for an excellent video
6:35 The 4th grey line from the bottom in the right most QR code is missing 1 grey dot.
True! The middle one of the three white squares should be grey :P
AND... fun with Excel! Great video.
i'm just wondering where is the 'data' come from . thanx
Thank you very much for the walkthrough.
BTW, half a byte (four bits) is traditionally called a nybble.
Thanks. Super well explained
Are you able to decode the ancient maya statue with the QR code face? What is it?
Great stuff....... I especially enjoyed the definitions of the marks and coding types around the three corners. With the inverting of every other line, this tells me more about it. But I now see there are several ways of encoding those characters, and although I know the standard ASCII HEX codes for all letters and digits by heart, if I don't detect the proper encoding type first, the rest will be garbage. But very well done.
Hey man I got a qr/datamatrix code puzzle but I cant solve it. Can you help me with it?
Does anyone know of any features a code might have that would prevent me from being able to decode it by hand? Some of the values I am getting don't make any sense...and I'm quite sure that the mistake is not in my method, but that there is some sort of double masking or something. Has anyone ever heard of something like this?
I have a doubt wat to do in interleaved blocks, in some qr codes there are mall cubical blocks in between also,wat to do in those cases?
how to find encryption code there? please help
Thanks for sharing this knowledge with us. I have been looking for an understandable method for awhile. Your explanation is the easiest to follow. I will be trying it out on a code I found that I believe unlocks something special. Perhaps I will ask your opinion, as well. Thanks again.
I mean you could just use your phone camera...
There's one error in this video. When you apply the masking, the purple fixed patterns weren't skipped over. They were merely ignored. In other words, for this specific qr code, the grey lines should start from the first line (0th line), and then the third, the fifth (skipped cuz it's fixed pattern), and seventh and so forth.
Hey man I got a puzzle. Can you help me solve it?
Isn't it the 7th line that is fixed not the 5th?
The grey lines with the black squares makes it look like bedrock.
Man your video is 100x better than the wikipedia sh$t
I always thought a QR code had some internet magic in it and that something had to be activated for it to be read. Never realized it's basically just information written in another language.
Do you know to to decode version 3 and up? it seems like they are different to decode
I don't understand English very well but your explanation was damn good!! Thank you...
Awesome! Thanks for the video.
How come the 'Robomatics' QR code at 0:01 is totally different from the one at 15:44 ? Confuses me enormously.
Why is the end block for the wiki QR not four blank spaces?
Cant express my thankfulness to you !! awesome video and explanation
now got a good idea about Qr code
I want you to explain it if the message is big
Hey man, I got a puzzle. Can you help me solve it?
0:22 "QR codes are actually a beast of a code" or if flipped it is actually "the code of the Beast...!"
Know what you're dealing with!
Shut the fuck up not everything is made by satan
It's a method of data storage. If you could see what sectors look like magnetically on your hdd it also has a strange appearance. Computers aren't great with image recognition so we store data as simple for them as possible. What looks easy for us is tough for a computer and what is simple for a computer is tough for us. We aren't the same. Nothing to do with religion we just need a way to talk to them quickly. Our interface with machines is a huge limiting factor we are always trying to make it easier. We have a bandwidth limitation that is done by either scanning things or slowly punching stuff in with our fingers. Nowadays talking sometimes.
It's all just way to store and talk to a machine it's nothing to worry about you are educating yourself on them though and that's good hopefully the fear of them has relaxed a bit and you understand more of how they work and what they do. It's just a piece of paper or sticker with the ability to help communicate with your computer to make lives easier. You are doing right though by investigating and learning about them.
The first little bit, as you called it, is actually an encoding nibble, as it is half a byte. Along the same lines, two bytes is equal to a sandwich. Programmers are hungry people, so you will find a lot of hardware and software named after food.
very cool, thank you!
Can you please send a link for all the codes you need to solve it? I am using android (mobile) so wikipedia won't show me all the info.
When did you unmask the message to get the ascii values?
Heyo, I like the video, very nice, but when I want to decode, I need to use some ridiculously complicated masks, how do I get them?
Great Video!
Hi!
I exported my accounts from Google Authenticator, but the QR code is too complex and will not be scanned by the phone. What is the solution? Would a good camera like an iphone be able to scan? Or is it possible to decode manually?
I don't think you're supposed to ignore that row of timing patterns when you damasking the code. On my own attempt that has caused all the boxes above it to be the inversion of what they should be, also the example on wiki implies that its the first layer that is inverted.
I have a similar problem, what is this row of timing patterns you're talking about please ?