Tech Gringo

Put A Text Watermark In Your Videos

If you are doing any kind of video marketing for your site, then you want to take every advantage you can of your videos. You want to get your web address in front of as many eyes as possible. You also want to keep other people from stealing your videos and getting traffic from them instead of you.

One way to get traffic is to put a title screen and a credits screen on your video where you can show your webpage. This works really well and helps you hone a message, but these screens can easily be take out of a video if someone wants to make it their own. In other words, someone else can benefit from your hard work.

Fortunately, there is a better way. A great to protect every single frame of your video is to use a watermark. Watermarks can’t easily be taken out of a video. They stay there, no matter how many times they are uploaded and downloaded, no matter if someone else tries to benefit from a video or not. You can make your watermark be your web address and you can benefit from your video marketing, day after day.

There are several commercial video editing programs that can help you put a watermark in your videos. I’m sure they work well, but these commercial video editing programs cost money. I am cheap so I always prefer to use open source programs. And yes, there is an open source alternative that can help you EASILY add a watermark to your videos before you upload them, it’s called ffmpeg.

There’s a Windows version for it, but I use the version that’s in the repos for Ubuntu. Just go to the command line and type:

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg

and you are set.

Once it’s installed, all you need to do to use it is go to a terminal and type this:

ffmpeg -i ~/Desktop/rawvideo.mpg
-vhook '/usr/lib/vhook/drawtext.so
-f /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/Arial.ttf
-x 5 -y 5 -t Visit TechGringo.Com' ~/Desktop/finished.avi

Important note: Those four lines are a single command and need to be entered on a single line.

That’s it. You now have a simple text watermark in the videos you upload to Youtube and other sites.

Flash Cookies: Hidden Menace?

I am very concerned about privacy online. If I am using my computer at home, I dutifully clean out my cache from time to time and clean out my cookies on a regular basis. If I am using a computer at an internet cafe, I will do it when I first start using the computer and once again when I am completely finished. Just to be sure, I’ll even shut down the browser. I am so concerned about online privacy that I use Firefox instead of Internet Explorer.

I thought that I was taking proper precautions, but I thought wrong. I never knew that Flash, the browser plugin that powers many web applications, stores cookies of its own. I never even gave it a thought, but when I decided to check out my Flash settings, boy did I get a surprise. Dozens of websites that I have visited since I built this computer had stored flash cookies within the flash application folder. That means that those websites could track my visits to them on a regular basis. I find that just freaky. These aren’t the cookies you can delete inside your privacy settings in your browser, these are separate.

If you are like me, you don’t like having cookies that stay forever on your computer. While Adobe Flash doesn’t advertise that Flash stores cookies and they don’t make it well known how to change your Flash settings, it is relatively easy to clean out Flash cookies.

Here’s how you do it:

Visit http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager07.html. This is where you can adjust many Flash settings, but we are interested primarily in the Flash cookies.

On this page, you’ll see something that looks like this:

Scroll through the list and you can see the literally dozens of sites that put these Flash cookies on your hard drive. Sites like Google Adwords, Youtube and Paypal are there along with sites you might never remember visiting. Freaky, isn’t it?

Now it’s time to delete these cookies. This is the easiest part, just click on the button that says Delete all sites and the cookies vanish and your computer is once again clean.