How to remove advertising

Introduction

This How to applies to H.264/MP4 files only but will probably work with H.264/MOV files too.

When recording a movie from a TV channel, some advertising may appear during a few seconds in a small box within the video stream.

As shown below, it's possible to remove advertising without having to re-encode the full movie.

Prerequisite

This page is intended for Windows 10 users but can be adapted by Unix users with only small changes.

First stage

Use the drawbox video filter to check the position and size of the advertising. You may also use the -ss and -t options to confirm starting and ending time.

ffmpeg -ss 20:45 -t 13 -i "INPUT.mp4" -map 0 -c copy -c:v libx264 -b:v 2400K -vf drawbox=x=740:y=962:w=416:h=44:c=red:t=1 "OUTPUT.mp4"

Second stage

The second stage consist in 3 steps :

• create segments of the input movie
• re-encode the small segment containing the advertising, using the delogo video filter
• concatenate the resulting segments

Here is the batch file :

@echo off
echo ======== Create segments
ffmpeg -i "INPUT.mp4" -map 0 -c copy -f segment -segment_times 20:45,20:58 SEGMENT%%02d.mp4
::
echo ======== Remove advertising
ffmpeg -i SEGMENT01.mp4 -map 0 -c copy -c:v libx264 -b:v 2400K -vf delogo=740:962:416:44 SEGMENT01+.mp4
::
echo ======== Concatenate segments
echo file 'SEGMENT00.mp4'>SEGMENTS.txt
echo file 'SEGMENT01+.mp4'>>SEGMENTS.txt
echo file 'SEGMENT02.mp4'>>SEGMENTS.txt
ffmpeg -auto_convert 1 -f concat -i SEGMENTS.txt -c copy -map 0 "OUTPUT.mp4"
pause