easiest way to add watermark to DAT/MPG or wmv files

[hoomi]

Folks
This may sound simple but excuse me for being a bit naive. I was able to read info about adding subtitles to VCd but I want to know what's the easiest way to add watermark to DAT/MPG or wmv files?
I don't want anything fancy, just something simple. Adding watermark containg a small band of text like www.yahoo.com is all I want, I don't want to edit the video quality or audio, i want to leave it as is and just add a watermark over the entire video. The least editing the better. Any suggestions?
Thanks in advance

[gll99]

Most editing programs that allow overlays (text or video) will let you do that. For text you can overlay a title over the video for a specified duration and just extend it to the whole movie if you want. MGI VideoWave has that feature (now Roxio). Ulead Media/VideoStudio and Adobe Premiere probably do also. I believe there are also free virtualdub filters which adds logos and others to mask or remove them.

[Ejoc]

You'd have to re-encode the video, losing picture quality. If all you want is text, you could use subtitle functions to add em.

In AVISynth you could do it with:
subtitle("www.yahoo.com")

But you would have to re-encode the entire video clip.

[hoomi]

Thanks for the guidance guys.
So if i get it right, no matter how I add text logo to a mpg/dat file, I will have to re-encode the file, right?

[FOO]

Not quite.
If you make a DVD you could put your text as a Subtitle
which goes in a separate stream from the video.
No good with WMV

[Ejoc]

I just got Womble MPEG2VCR yesterday, and I found that you can overlay graphic files over your video. It was pretty fast, you might want to give it a try.

[FOO]

Was it faster than a re-encode ?

[Ejoc]

For the little experiment I tried yea. If you apply it to only a range, just that part is rencoded, so it zips thru the un modified parts. But even when it adds the image and has to re-encode its fast. It treats black as transparent, and just overlays it. I encoded a 5 minute clip in around 5 minutes.