Safe streaming video with dynamic watermark

Question

What are some scalable and secure ways to provide streaming video to a recipient with their name superimposed as a watermark?

Answer 1

I think you want to use the ffmpeg libavfilter library . This basically allows you to overlay the image on top of the video. There is an example showing how to insert a transparent PNG logo in the lower left corner of the input. You can interact with the library from C ++ or from the command line on the command line.

In older versions of ffmpeg, you will need to use an extension library called watermark.so, often located in /usr/lib/vhook/watermark.so

You may also consider using an invisible digital watermark depending on your content. It embeds a digital sequence in your video that is not visually detectable. Even if someone removes the visible watermark, the invisible watermark will still remain. If the user was supposed to redistribute your video, an invisible watermark will indicate the source of the redistribution.

Of course, there are also companies that provide video content management, but I understand that you want to do it yourself. Real-time watermarking will be very resource intensive, especially when scaling. I would like to make some type of predicative watermark.

Answer 2

Some comments here are very good. Using libavfilter is probably a good place to start. The watermark for each frame will be very expensive because it requires decoding and re-encoding the entire video for each viewer.

One idea that I would like to expand is to watermark only parts of the video. I assume that you are working with h.264 video, which requires much more processor cycles for decoding and encoding than older codecs. I think that you could mark 1 or 2 threads in real time on the processor core. If you can reduce your requirements to 10 seconds, marked out of 100, then you are talking about 10-20 per core, about 100 per server. This is probably not the performance you are looking for.

I think some companies sell watermarking equipment for teleoperators, but I doubt it is cheaper than a server rack and much less flexible.