DVD Watermark?

[NoddingTurdFAN]

Is there any way to un-obviously watermark a video file during the .avi stage so that if the finalized DVD is ever converted to Divx or VCD it can be recognized as having come from the DVD source?

Thx,

E

[NoddingTurdFAN]

oooooookkkk....

Well then how do people feel about small logos in the bottom right corner of their videos? This would mark the video so that the definitive source would be known if the material surfaced as vcd, divx etc...MD5 checksums are good to an extent but DVDs can be re-authored w/new menus or chapter marks. Adding small logo (a bug) would let everyone know waht "version: the source is. Am I making sense?

E

I see what your goal is and it definitely makes sense. The prob with watermarking is it is obtrusive and also for people with projection or plasma, stagnant images are to be avoided.

id say the best thing to do is throw a few frames in that are watermarked and keep track of it on your end what frame #s you watermarked. maybe just a small dot somewhere on the screen so the normal viewer wont notice it. thats what iw ould do

[NoddingTurdFAN]

Originally Posted by fistula

I see what your goal is and it definitely makes sense. The prob with watermarking is it is obtrusive and also for people with projection or plasma, stagnant images are to be avoided.

id say the best thing to do is throw a few frames in that are watermarked and keep track of it on your end what frame #s you watermarked. maybe just a small dot somewhere on the screen so the normal viewer wont notice it. thats what iw ould do

Great Idea. Point taken regarding Plasma..hadn't remembered that.


E

You can also add something in the overscan area that would not be viewable on most television monitors but would be contained in the video information. It could be very subtle and known only to you.

[RainDawg]

I personally hate watermarks, as I find them obtrusive and annoying. I understand your point, and for your purposes I would just put a small mark at the beginning of the video, maybe for the first few seconds, to help identify the source. It's true that things can be reauthored and changed, but this would at least identify it without making a mark on the entire recording.

[willndmb]

i think you have it backwords myself
you would want the water mark to not be seen on a vcd and seen on dvd if it was converted
who cares if you have a vcd that was made from a dvd, the quaility would be good
but vcd to dvd you would be at a loss

[RainDawg]

VCD made from a DVD would not be good quality at all. It's simply an awful, blasphemous thing to do

[feralicious]

Originally Posted by fistula

I see what your goal is and it definitely makes sense. The prob with watermarking is it is obtrusive and also for people with projection or plasma, stagnant images are to be avoided.

id say the best thing to do is throw a few frames in that are watermarked and keep track of it on your end what frame #s you watermarked. maybe just a small dot somewhere on the screen so the normal viewer wont notice it. thats what iw ould do

What's the deal with stagnant images on plasma?

And also, shouldhn't the placement of the marks be noted in the txt file (assuming people are trading DVDs in the best way possible, with txt, any artwork and md5s included)? Isn't the purpose for everyone to know and not just the creator of the DVD? Would noting the position of them cause the person doing the down-conversion to fix it if they knew it was there or would they really bother with it?

You know that's what the studios do now, they put black dots across various frames so they can track down what theaters pirating took place in. I find them annoying. But they really stand out to me since part of my job was making sure the film was clean for screenings so when I see black dots go by it makes me think there's some major grease pencil residue on there. They're not too subtle about it.
But if you did something far more discreet than what they do I think it would be fine.

[katnapz]

Originally Posted by feralicious

You know that's what the studios do now, they put black dots across various frames so they can track down what theaters pirating took place in.

Are you sure you're not referring to the changeover cue marks that are put on the film to tell the projectionist when to flip from one projector (reel) to another? This is a small black circle (or oval if the film is shown out of proportion) that flashes in the top right corner of the film every ~20 minutes or so. As far as I know (and I did some refresh research on the net before posting here) the watermarking used by studios for pirated movies is unobservable to the eye,...and serialized so they can trace a copy back to the source. And they may use a "Property Of/Do Not Duplicate" scroller. A couple of black dots would be way to easy for someone to edit out of a pirated copy.

What really p*sses me off is when I see them on a DVD release of a movie...which tells me that the studio didn't give a rats behind about the quality of the film when they transferred it, as they should've been removed.

Originally Posted by feralicious

And also, shouldhn't the placement of the marks be noted in the txt file (assuming people are trading DVDs in the best way possible, with txt, any artwork and md5s included)? Isn't the purpose for everyone to know and not just the creator of the DVD? Would noting the position of them cause the person doing the down-conversion to fix it if they knew it was there or would they really bother with it?

You definitely wouldn't want to put that info in the txt file. If you note the frame number that has the watermark anyone could simply go and remove that frame or alter it. That would defeat the purpose of a watermark if people knew how to remove it.

also plasma burn in is a huge problem, if you have a plasma set and dont know about it go google it cause its easy to wreck your tv

those black dots on theater prints used to be horribly annoying red dots, which are diff from the "cigarette burns" when the reels change

[RainDawg]

I can't hear the phrase "cigarette burns" without thinking of Fight Club. Hmm...now THAT would be an interesting way to alter some bootleg DVDs.

"Nice big cock"

[willndmb]

Originally Posted by RainDawg

VCD made from a DVD would not be good quality at all. It's simply an awful, blasphemous thing to do

i don't think so
i have seen vcds made form dvds, commercial dvds
and they look fine depending on the compression
however once you have a vcd already compressed if you try and redue it into a dvd you already lost the initial quality so you can't get it back.

either way i think its a bad idea as a whole to convert from one to the other

Putting a DVD on a VCD is like recording a 5.1 Audio DVD to a cassette tape bought at your local supermarket that has had it on the sun beaten shelf for 15 years

[RainDawg]

Well, we'll have to agree to disagree on this one. There is a lot of pissing and moaning (rightfully so) about mp3 formats around here, but there are precious few people here who could consistently pass a properly setup double-blind test with original PCM audio and 192KBps+ Mp3. Anyone (and this includes my half-blind grandmother) could tell you within 3 seconds which is which in a direct comparison of DVD and a VCD made from it, especially if they were both played on the same size screen (the VCD would have to expand it's resolution to fill the screen, making it quite blocky).

Making a VCD is, in my opinion, 100 times more despicable than making an mp3 out of an audio file.