[Ffmpeg-devel] watermark vhook and -vcodec copy

[The Wanderer]

Rich Felker wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 28, 2005 at 06:56:20PM +0100, Chris wrote:
> 
>> I have been playing around with vhooks and the watermark vhook by
>> Marcus Engene is very impressive indeed. My intention is to use it
>> to add a watermark for a set duration say 10 seconds, and it works
>> well. I would like to be able to do this to ffmpeg runs where the
>> -vcodec copy parameter is used but it is not working,
>> unsurprisingly.
>> 
>> Has anyone managed to get a vhook working for -vcodec copy? Is
>> anyone interested in attempting it?
> 
> No, this is complete and utter nonsense. Copying video frames and
> modifying them are mutually exclusive.

It wasn't all that long ago (about three weeks, actuallly) that I had a
conversation here with a person who was insisting that it should be
possible to crop without decoding/re-encoding, i.e., with the same base
behaviour as '-vcodec copy'; IIRC the discussion came about because he
was surprised that MEncoder wasn't letting him do that. I believe he
indicated that there is a program which can do it already, but which is
compatible with fewer types of files than MPlayer/etc. is...

The reason I mention this is that, because of that last point, I'm
curious as to whether or not this falls under the heading of "modifying"
as it's defined in this context; it would seem unintuitive to me, but he
made a fairly persuasive argument that since you are in fact duplicating
the parts you want to keep and completely discarding everything else,
it's still reasonable to call the behaviour "copying". I'm not sure
there isn't a hole in that, but I'm not technically compentent enough to
tell for certain.

-- 
       The Wanderer

Warning: Simply because I argue an issue does not mean I agree with any
side of it.

A government exists to serve its citizens, not to control them.