Removing watermarks from videos, best methods?

I hate watermarks on videos. I was watching an old film noir that I downloaded from Youtube but it had a watermark on it from some TV station that originally aired it. I've seen movies where it looks like they placed a blur tool over where a watermark was and it hides it by blurring it, which looks better.

Does anyone do video editing here? Know of any free programs that can remove or obscure a watermark? And no I'm not trying to upload the video as my own. I just hate watching a classic movie with a station ID or watermark in the corner.

You're probably not realistically going to get a way to just straight-up remove it, particularly with free software. The best you can probably do is just to blur that tiny bit of the screen, but I wonder if that's necessarily better. Your call, I suppose.

For something that simple, even a built-in editor like Windows MovieMaker might do the trick. If not, DaVinci Resolve has a free version. But it'll involve a little bit of a learning curve, so you'll have to care about this a fair bit for it to be worthwhile, I think.

Thanks...I seen one old movie that someone had used the blur over the watermark and I preferred that over the watermark itself. I should mention I need a cross platform as I use Linux. DaVinci Resolve free version will work on Linux but the learning curve might be an issue for me. Any others?

OpenShot, which is free, is reportedly available on Linux. I can't recall if there's a blur filter in there or not. There will probably be a learning curve. I only periodically open one of these types of apps for little personal projects, so my knowledge of them isn't great.

Thanks for the reply. I have OpenShot as an app image but haven't really used it. I did find a brief mention of using Avidemux so I downloaded that as an app image and it did the trick, it blurred the watermark and matched the surrounding pixels to mask it, leaving a slight blur. These screenshots are from the noir Strange Fascination (1952)

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Try a low tech solution, like telling your brain to ignore it. Our brains do that all the time to stuff that seems inessential, like how you don't notice the flowers when you're being stalked by the tiger. On a more video level, not noticing scan lines, cropped images and grain happen almost automatically. You won't run into copyright issues when your brain does the erasure.

In my other life as a photographer, I've used lots of software that has the intent of removing things from images, but that's a frame by frame edit and the software method is never better than mediocre since, at least for some things, removing the part you don't want is easy, but what to replace it with, since the image background is now incomplete, is never quite satisfactory without a lot of frame-by-frame work.

I can ignore grain and blurry images in movies, in fact I watch mainly really old stuff and blurry, crappy images is the norm. I do hate it when an uploader changes the ratio of the movie image. Usually they try making it wide screen from the old traditional 4:3 ratio. Bugs the hell out of me as people become short and wide and if they crop the top and bottom of the image mid-close ups become extreme close ups. I've fixed the stretch ratio before easily enough with Handbrake but if the image has been cropped then that's lost.

Interesting that you mentioned photograph, I use to enter my photos in photo shows and enjoyed going and seeing the competition...The competition has gotten superb!...And I haven't entered anything since the pandemic.

I sell them online under a different pseudonym, on a site called Fine Art America. They do all of the grunt work (printing, shipping, framing, etc) and you take a cut in the final price. I'm flattered to know that my images grace a bunch of dining room walls, coffee mugs, etc. I never figured on making a living out of it, but it's cool to sell something.

Very cool, is that your soul source of income?

It's not much of a source of income for me, more of a pat on the back. People who do that to make a living have to work much harder at it than I'm willing to do. I have no illusions about it, but it has its enjoyable aspects.