Any way to remove a watermark?

[time_lord]

Hi, is there anyway to remove the watermark (aka 'DOG' or 'BUG') that broadcasters typically put in one corner of the screen when broadcasting? Is there some sort of plugin available?
Obviously some are more opaque than others; some completely solid so there'd be no way to remove them without leaving part of the screen blank! But some are mostly transparent...

Has anyone ever written any code to do this? I'm not interested in post-processing (except maybe for something pre-recorded), so real-time image manipulation like this might mean your average PC wouldn't be grunty enough to do this on-the-fly?

Thanks, Phil

[stustunz]

ffdshow decoder has the option i had little bit of a play but you end up with a blurry box
although there is a option to use a icon file so that might work a bit better but im sure it still wont be a 100%

[bgowland]

I asked this a while back - there were a few suggestions in the thread here...

http://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.php?t=28892

I didn't have time to play much so didn't come to any conclusions. Let me know how you get on, it'd be nice to get rid of them.

Cheers,
Brian

[martint123]

I tried one or two with not very good results. Judging by the speed, you syand no changce of realtime removal.

[bgowland]

I tried one or two with not very good results. Judging by the speed, you syand no changce of realtime removal.

I was looking to do this as a post-processing excercise as almost everything I watch is recorded. There was one which could be fine tuned quite well which gave promising results but I can't remember which one it was.

In theory there's no reason why some non-animated semi-transparent logos can't be removed near perfectly with software, albeit as a post-processing task for recordings only. If someone wrote a DirectShow transform filter with working logic, it could even be done in realtime. Now wouldn't that be sweet?

Cheers,
Brian

[rob11252]

You may want to check http://www.videohelp.com.

You may start with the article "How to extract/remove subtitles/logo from a video" http://www.videohelp.com/guides/category...-5;66#5;66

Although they are not talking about doing it in real time.

[bgowland]

You may start with the article "How to extract/remove subtitles/logo from a video" http://www.videohelp.com/guides/category...-5;66#5;66

Nice link.

I just had a play with VirtualDubMOD and the LogoAway plugin filter. Even though I didn't have the slightest idea what I was doing with the LogoAway filter, I managed to get promising results within a few minutes. OK - sometimes the logo removal did leave a blurry blob depending on the background but often it wasn't noticeable in the quick test I did.

There seems to be a lot of options to tweak and (I think) the option to use a logo bmp file as a 'mask' for more accurate removal.

Worth a further look in my opinion.

Cheers,
Brian

[time_lord]

Thanks very much for the replies chaps.
Given that I'm new to GBPVR (I don't even have my hardware yet!) and from your comments it looks like the post-processing is the only real option (unless that DirectShow transform filter comes along ;-) ).

I don't know yet how flexible GBPVR is... are the techniques from the videohelp.com website able to be integrated with GBPVR (eg so that after a recording is made, GBPVR can automatically post-process the recording to remove watermark)?

Thanks, Phil

[martint123]

Yes, there are post-processing batch files that can be run for many nefarious purposes.