Can video really be hidden within video for subliminals?

[glenv]

There is a lot of controversy over subliminal messaging and this thread really is not to debate that topic.

There is a company that claims to be able to create a subliminal dvd that is made up of a video of a fish aquarium with aquarium noise and they say they hide video and sounds in the background.

Can this really be done?

If the video was available could someone pull out the supposed hidden content or does that depend on the means they used to add it? I have access to one of these videos only to see if this is a scam or not.

The only company I found that does this uses it to promote seduction techniques for men to supposedly get women to go to bed with them. I am not interested in that but would like to learn more about this type of masking for a colleague in the mental awareness research field.

Anyway - looking for your input.

[jagabo]

Can you see the "hidden" image?

That was created by blending two images together with AviSynth's Merge() function. One video has a weighting of 97 percent, the other 3 percent (Merge(v1, v2, 0.03)). You actually can see a little of the hidden image but you might not notice if you didn't know it was there.

The hidden image can be partially restored by subtracting out the 97 percent image and increasing the contrast of what remains (subtract(m1,v1).Levels(120, 1, 136, 0, 255) in AviSynth):

And the original hidden image:

They may do a little more processing but that's probably their basic idea.

There is a field of research about hiding data within images, steganography. That type of hiding wouldn't work for subliminal purposes.

[filmboss80]

At best, subliminal effects can enhance mood (like the flash frames of the white demon face in "The Exorcist"), but there is no evidence that they have any significant level of influence over behavior.

Good interpersonal relation skills are the best persuaders. A video trick is a poor substitute.

[glenv]

As I mnetioned - I do not want to debate its effctiveness - that is up to the individual. So how could someone do this? It is real complicated?

[jman98]

As I mnetioned - I do not want to debate its effctiveness - that is up to the individual. So how could someone do this? It is real complicated?

jagabo told you exactly how to do this in his post. Read it again.

[glenv]

if a video was built with this method could the two videos be extracted separately?

[Des]

Wow, suddenly I feel like getting some popcorn and drinking a Coke

Since the question of technique has been answered, I figure I would point to the Book "Subliminal Seduction" by Wilson Bryan Key, if anyone wants to actually look into the uses and results. Though it was written in the 1970s it's still fairly relevant.

I did a psych paper on this 'back-in-the-day' and generally the end result is at best as filmboss80 stated.

It works best on primal and base emotions but anything greater requires a person who is more intune with themselves. Most people are not. They may feel or sense something but have no idea what so they shrug it off and don't react.
Also, it requires some paying attention to the screen which is something I think people are doing less and less as distractions become greater and greater.

Same principals can be used in audio as well.

--dES

[jagabo]

if a video was built with this method could the two videos be extracted separately?

Not really. At least not easily, and not perfectly.

I'm thinking of two numbers. I perform an operation on them to reduce them to one number. The result is 50. What were my two numbers? Obviously, you have no way of knowing. Even if I tell you the operation was (A+B)/2 you still don't know what the two original numbers were. If I tell you one of my numbers was 97 you now have enough information to say what the other number was. In my example images above I was able to partially reconstruct the hidden image because I had access to the other original image. If I had spent more time on the AviSynth algorithm I could have reconstructed the secondary image more accurately.

So you have a video that somehow contains a second video embedded within it. You don't know the algorithm used and you have no access to either source video. You can examine the video for clues to the algorithm. For example, if the main video fades to black you can look at what's left. If the algorithm was as simple as my 97/3 weighted average just amplifying the nearly black frame would reveal the second video. If the main video is still for a period of time you could subtract the average of several frames and the secondary image would become more obvious. Etc.

[guns1inger]

The only company I found that does this uses it to promote seduction techniques for men to supposedly get women to go to bed with them.

They probably also sell Spanish Fly, synthetic pheromones and books that guarantee you sex . . . . .

And you were at this site because ?


The old single frame flash simply doesn't work, and is less effective now than it was in the 70's. We are so used to the Tony Scott/Michael Bay school of editing that even single frame cuts actually register now. We have become attuned to such base trickery. Try watching the first ten minutes of Fight Club and watch for Tyler's brief appearances. Embedding images as semi-transparent is also dubious as a workable technique, and certainly not reversible - and why would you want to anyway ?

If you are looking for a method to hide a movie inside a movie to transport it, then retrieve it later, you are looking at the wrong techniques entirely. What you would really want to investigate in that case would be steganography - hiding the data of the first video inside the data of the second video in an encrypted form. It is possible to encrypt, say a text document, inside a photograph (e.g. jpeg). To anyone looking at the photo, that is all it is, and indistinguishable form the original jpeg. However once decrypted, the original text file can be extracted.

[edDV]

Stay tuned for the Blipvert.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blipvert

[guns1inger]

Loved Max Headroom (at least the English pilot. Some of the series suffered from tighter censorship controls from US network TV)