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.

Re: Removing watermarks from videos, best methods?
 

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)