Comment by CarlsJrMints

5 years ago

> binary QR decoding for ZBar

I just saw a video the other day about storing video games in QR codes where the poster submitted a patch for ZBar. Was that you?

Video games in QR codes? That's interesting. Do you have the link to the video? Is it this one?

https://youtu.be/ExwqNreocpg

https://github.com/mchehab/zbar/commit/5bc323849569a629aa0d1...

If so, then the patch he submitted builds upon my work! He fixed a line feed conversion bug that was present in Windows. I use Linux so I did not experience this issue.

I remember seeing that patch get merged but I didn't know about the whole video game context. This is amazing. I wrote the patch because I was trying to print a 4096 bit RSA secret key as a QR code. Awesome to see it getting used for something even more awesome.

Here are the links to my contributions and related pages:

https://github.com/mchehab/zbar/pull/64

https://github.com/mchehab/zbar/issues/55

https://github.com/mchehab/zbar/issues/82

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=703234

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=710009

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Paperkey#Restore_the_se...

https://stackoverflow.com/a/60518608/512904

ZBar used to automatically convert binary data to text when decoding 8 bit QR codes, mangling the data in the process. My patch adds the option to disable that, enabling the data to be extracted without corruption.

I also added the one shot feature to the ZBar tools to make it easier to use in automated scripts that expect exactly one output:

https://github.com/mchehab/zbar/pull/60

Looks like we have a real world application for tiny ELFs now!

https://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.ht...

  • Yes, that's the one!

    Storing secret keys as QR codes is an interesting application as well. I remember reading on here about a CEO who printed out a database encryption key as a base64 string and then couldn't type it in correctly when it was needed to restore backups. A machine-readable format definitely seems the way to go.