Comment by ComputerGuru
20 hours ago
It’s not exactly watermarking; each encoder works in a different way and it’s readily possible to determine (for one versed in such matters) which encoder was used to generate a video by inspecting the structure of the raw (eg h264) bitstream. This might not work reliably enough for simpler codecs like JPEG but for something as complicated as modern video codec where there are a million ways to generate a compatible payload it is as unique as a fingerprint.
That’s true, but I thought of embedding a serial number and a date into the video, periodically, for example, which can be quantized as noise, but not very visible unless you filter the frame a very specific way, or pass through a tool.
It’s fairly useless since raw footage isn’t typically distributed; it would be re-encoded first which would definitely destroy that watermark. So it would be a scandal that doesn’t necessarily accomplish much.