Video Identification

[Cworthy]

Hi -- In my business, I frequently distribute a wmv file to my customers who have purchased the wmv. It doesn't happen often, thankfully, but occasionally a customer will post my wmv online where it can be freely accessed by anyone who searches for it. This is very harmful to my business.

I'm sure this is hardly a unique problem, and I'm wondering if anyone knows a method of easily hiding some form of identification in each wmv file. If I could accomplish that, I would at least know to avoid doing business with the person who purchased my wmv and shared it.

Many thanks for all suggestions!

[guns1inger]

There are two main methods. The most often used would be digital watermarking, which embeds a code in the video in such as way that it is invisible to the player, and also can (usually) survive the video being re-encoded to a different format. This is a commercial protection, so I don't know if there are any free or reasonably priced solutions.

The other method would be steganography, which lets you encode pretty much anything inside a video or still image, and then retrieve it again. It is an extension of digital watermarking, and there are free solutions for still images, and maybe for video. Google would be your friend here, but to get you started you could try here

[Ai Haibara]

You're wanting to hide something specific in each video, specific to each customer, so that you can easily identify who uploaded the video, right? Some of these methods would probably require you to re-encode the video for each customer; I don't know if you'd want your video to take that potential quality hit.

Of course, there's also the usual WMV DRM. ASF/WMA/WMV files also have some function(s) to open the default web browser and automatically load a specific webpage, I believe, but I haven't looked into it, and don't know whether or not it could simply just send an ID to a server, or something. Keep in mind, however, that customers would likely view that as invasive or a malware tactic.

Most of these methods, including the methods guns1inger mentioned, can probably be easily bypassed by simply re-encoding the video, though.

[hech54]

I sent a guy a DVD last week. Before I sent it I edited the Volume Label in ImgBurn with his name. He's a newbie and it freaked him out a bit..

[Nelson37]

Start simple. Just name the file with an embedded code number, change that for each customer. Many will be dumb enough to just upload the file with the original name. Then, prosecute the offender for theft. Since you are not a large, successful movie studio, this will be viewed by most as acceptable.

You could also target the smartest of the bunch with an encoded-in-the-video number, format it like a time stamp and most won't notice. Again, prosecute for theft and make it very public.