Adding a watermark to an mpeg-2 video file

[bobzy20]

Hello as you can see I'm a new user and would love some help.

I have a few mpeg-2 video files that need a watermark adding to them but I really don't want to lose any picture quality.

I've already looked at a few programs like, 'The Watermark Factory' and 'VirtualDubMod' which are great at adding watermarks but then I need to re-encode them into avi files which turns a 126mb mpeg-2 file into about a 2-3GB avi file which is far too big.

What I really need is a program that maybe 'overlays' a text file but doesn't re-encode.

I've had a look on the net but can't really find a solution.

Any help would be great.

Thanks

Bob

[Baldrick]

You must reencode if you want it permanent in the picture.

You can make a subtitle that always shows but many players will ignore it or you can just switch it off/demux the subtitle from the video.

[bobzy20]

Cheers Baldrick.

Do you know how I can re-encode the videos without losing much quality and without increasing the size of the videos by too much?

Thanks

Bob

[Baldrick]

Use a compression in virtualdubmod. Like xvid codec. Under Video->Compression choose xvid, click configure to adjust the bitrate for smaller output size.

Or output as uncompressed big avi files and shrink to a mpeg2 with hcenc.

[Nelson37]

Yes, if the re-encode goes to the same format and roughly the same bitrate as the original, the size will be about the same and only a slight loss in quality.

No way to avoid the re-encode.

[bobzy20]

Cheers Baldrick.

I used virtualdubmod & the xvid codec and it worked like a dream, the loss in quality is minimal and the file sizes have decreased from their original size too which is fantastic.

Top-noch stuff

Thanks again

Bob