How can I achieve on-the-spot watermarking
 

I want to offer the movies I have also as a download option. I was thinking of branding/watermarking them with the user name of the account holder so, if found on a torrent site, at least i have more details as to where from it came.

Is there currently a script around doing this? Or does anyone have an idea about it or currently applying this on their own content?

i believe someone posted a script on gfy to do exactly that. The major problem with any solution like this is , how much do you want to hinder your paying customers to route out the bad guys.

Watermarking into the frame itself will require a re-encoding of that frame, so there is a server hit when doing this. The methods described in the thread sounds like they're doing one or more of the following:

* Injecting metadata into the file. This is quick and easy and quite simple to do for a variety of file formats, but the metadata is stripped when the video is converted to a different format. It can also be readily identified and removed by a utility.

* Random stenographic watermark added to certain frames (ideally keyframes). A program could identify 10-50 keyframes in a video, and add the watermark very quickly. The problem here is the coding required to do this with the popular video formats. There are few WMV encoder technologies that don't use Microsoft's encoding tools, for example, and those work under Windows only. So if you want to watermark WMVs on the fly you'll need a Windows server.

Variations of the latter method is protected by a number of patents (Macrovision, Technicolor, Digimark, and so on), so if there are scripts out there that do this, they probably won't be highly publicized. Or not available for long. The outfits that DO license the technology charge a fortune. It's a shame really, but they're set up more for Big Hollywood than independent film makers who, in relative terms, have much more to lose from pirated content.

That truly sucks. I was hoping for the same solution TC is looking for - to watermark videos with the login/IP/date etc.

Agreed.

:disgust

If it's torrents and RS piracy that's the worry, then the uploaders aren't likely to bother converting the videos. In that case you can work with secret metadata. I'd probably encrypt the data to prevent people from being able to easily see it in a hex editor.

For FLVs I'd recommend a metadata injector that doesn't require recopying the whole file, like flvtool2 does. Otherwise for big files you're adding a lot to the server load, and the customer will have to wait for the reprocessing. For WMVs, it's trivial to write a .NET script to add arbitrary metadata, but this needs a Windows server to use the APIs. I've seen some generic PHP libraries that worked with WMV files, and similar utilities for AVI and MOV containers. It's been a few years, and hopefully the tools have gotten more stable.

Most video formats also permit a certain amount of junk bytes at their tail end. You can sometimes append arbitrary data to the end of the file and it'll still play perfectly well. You could just spit out some encoded strings containing date, IP, and username, and binary concatenate that to the end of the file. Technically feasible, but it would be a hassle to test it under all the various videos players.

Thanks for the tips! So if I would offer all but WMV then a Linux server would be able to achieve this with a delay to inject the meta data?

Really annoying to see that the different file types do not natively support content protection other then the DRM thingie...

If you're looking at the metadata route (much easier) start here:

getid3.org

and look at the methods for writing metadata. You could use a standardized metadata field and put your coded message in it.

If I were to do this, though, I'd probably do it a bit differently. Make a "master" media file and create an arbitrary metadata field. Insert into the field an encoded version of a string that contains the date (in serial form), the IP, and the username. Add padding for up to 12 or 14 characters for a username to accommodate the longest length you'll encounter.

Then, use a hex editor to note the byte offset of this data. On your server, have a Perl or PHP function replace the dummy data in the file with the user data. You will be replacing byte for byte, and the resulting file will be the same length. This seems like a job for most any competent Perl or PHP programmer.

If you're looking to go into the video stream and fiddle with the pixels of a frame to watermark it then that's that's a much bigger project.

A combination of htaccess and PHP is all that's needed for the watermarking magic.