• Remove metadata from MP4 on Windows

    From Oliver@21:1/5 to All on Mon Oct 14 23:57:07 2024
    XPost: rec.photo.digital

    What's the best way on Windows to offline remove all the identifying MP4 metadata before uploading a short video clip to a web site?

    Is there something offline that is better than right clicking on the MP4
    file to select Properties and then Details and then Remove Properties and Personal Information?

    This site suggests Microsoft's "Document Inspector" but the link is dead. https://safecomputing.umich.edu/protect-privacy/consider-metadata http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/remove-hidden-data-and-personal-information-by-inspecting-documents-HA010354329.aspx?CTT=1

    A search comes up with the Microsoft Document Inspector, but is that the
    best way to remove all the metadata from an MP4 file on Windows? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vba/library-reference/concepts/using-the-document-inspector

    This suggests using VLC offline to remove the metadata on Windows. https://pcdots.com/blog/remove-metadata-from-video/

    This suggests using FFMPEG or AVCONV to strip metadata from MP4 files. https://superuser.com/questions/441361/strip-metadata-from-all-formats-with-ffmpeg

    What method do you use to strip unnecessary metadata from an MP4 file?
    Is there any metadata that is necessary?

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  • From Alan Browne@21:1/5 to Oliver on Tue Oct 15 09:53:20 2024
    XPost: rec.photo.digital

    On 2024-10-15 01:57, Oliver wrote:
    What's the best way on Windows to offline

    exiftool

    Free. Powerful. Hard to use - but there are a lot of examples to do
    what you want to do.

    In your case:

    exiftool -all= <filename>

    Filename can be a complete path; or in terminal (CMD on Windows),
    navigate to the folder (sub directory?) and run the command.

    exiftool -all= *.mp4
    exiftoll -all= *.MP4 <- it may be case sensitive - don't recall

    https://exiftool.org

    --
    "It would be a measureless disaster if Russian barbarism overlaid
    the culture and independence of the ancient States of Europe."
    Winston Churchill

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  • From Alan Browne@21:1/5 to Alan Browne on Tue Oct 15 10:01:52 2024
    XPost: rec.photo.digital

    On 2024-10-15 09:53, Alan Browne wrote:
    On 2024-10-15 01:57, Oliver wrote:
    What's the best way on Windows to offline

    exiftool

    Free.  Powerful. Hard to use - but there are a lot of examples to do
    what you want to do.

    In your case:

    exiftool -all= <filename>

    Filename can be a complete path; or in terminal (CMD on Windows),
    navigate to the folder (sub directory?) and run the command.

    exiftool -all= *.mp4
    exiftoll -all= *.MP4      <- it may be case sensitive - don't recall

    https://exiftool.org

    I should add that a lot of the so-called tools out there with window interfaces, actually incorporate exiftool under the hood.

    --
    "It would be a measureless disaster if Russian barbarism overlaid
    the culture and independence of the ancient States of Europe."
    Winston Churchill

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Paul@21:1/5 to Oliver on Tue Oct 15 13:07:19 2024
    XPost: rec.photo.digital

    On Tue, 10/15/2024 1:57 AM, Oliver wrote:
    What's the best way on Windows to offline remove all the identifying MP4 metadata before uploading a short video clip to a web site?

    Is there something offline that is better than right clicking on the MP4 file to select Properties and then Details and then Remove Properties and Personal Information?

    This site suggests Microsoft's "Document Inspector" but the link is dead. https://safecomputing.umich.edu/protect-privacy/consider-metadata http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/remove-hidden-data-and-personal-information-by-inspecting-documents-HA010354329.aspx?CTT=1

    A search comes up with the Microsoft Document Inspector, but is that the best way to remove all the metadata from an MP4 file on Windows?
    https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vba/library-reference/concepts/using-the-document-inspector

    This suggests using VLC offline to remove the metadata on Windows. https://pcdots.com/blog/remove-metadata-from-video/

    This suggests using FFMPEG or AVCONV to strip metadata from MP4 files. https://superuser.com/questions/441361/strip-metadata-from-all-formats-with-ffmpeg

    What method do you use to strip unnecessary metadata from an MP4 file?
    Is there any metadata that is necessary?

    This line looks interesting. The "-c copy" is an attempt to not modify the video and audio stream, then the "map" options are attempts to edit the
    4CC in the movie containing metadata. Anything the CODEC does not recognize,
    is ignored, and that's how you store metadata, is make a 4CC that won't
    cause grief to the CODEC.

    ffmpeg -y -i "test.mkv" -c copy -map_metadata -1
    -metadata title="My Title" -metadata creation_time=2016-09-20T21:30:00 -map_chapters -1 "test.mkv"

    And obviously, some amount of metadata is needed for the movie to function,
    and these would be fields that are "in-band" and not "out-of-band". That
    is likely why the command is attempting to edit the Title. And the Title
    might show up in a Windows Properties dialog. Microsoft is only interested
    in certain fields, for the purposes of Search Indexer and other fields are ignored. I think they know what most all of the metadata is, but they
    won't write tools for it. Only a certain amount works in search.

    Generally, 4CC packets are length sensitive, and if you want to use a
    hex editor to expunge something, make sure you don't change the length.
    If the word was "Hello", you would replace it with "XXXXX".

    As for ownership of content, steganography or watermarking, there are
    some effective methods out there that are hard to remove. with the right
    tool, it might print on the screen "Property of Paramount Pictures".
    Metadata is the more "obvious" marking, but is not the only means.
    With a good watermark, even conversion from one CODEC to another, will
    not remove the marking.

    Paul

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  • From Oliver@21:1/5 to All on Tue Oct 15 22:23:22 2024
    XPost: rec.photo.digital

    On Tue, 15 Oct 2024 09:53:20 -0400, Alan Browne <bitbucket@blackhole.com>
    wrote

    exiftool -all= <filename>

    Filename can be a complete path; or in terminal (CMD on Windows),
    navigate to the folder (sub directory?) and run the command.

    exiftool -all= *.mp4
    exiftoll -all= *.MP4 <- it may be case sensitive - don't recall

    https://exiftool.org

    Thank you for that suggestion of exiftool-12.98_64 which I installed,
    renamed, and ran in the command line (noting that spaces are critical).

    copy with_exif_data.mp4 no_exif_data.mp4 exiftool<space>-all=<space>no_exif_data.mp4
    1 image files updated

    The problem is now I need to test what the difference is in exif data.

    The first program I tried was MediaInfo Version 24.06 from https://mediaarea.net/en/MediaInfo

    Certainly there was a difference but the need is for a program to reliably
    spit out ALL the metadata so that we can be sure any remaining identifying metadata is wiped clean before a video is uploaded to the web.

    Is there an offline program to spit out all the metadata in a comparable
    format (like csv or text) so that two outputs can be compared side by side?

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  • From Paul@21:1/5 to Oliver on Wed Oct 16 06:47:15 2024
    XPost: rec.photo.digital

    On Wed, 10/16/2024 12:23 AM, Oliver wrote:
    On Tue, 15 Oct 2024 09:53:20 -0400, Alan Browne <bitbucket@blackhole.com> wrote
    exiftool -all= <filename>

    Filename can be a complete path; or in terminal (CMD on Windows), navigate to the folder (sub directory?) and run the command.

    exiftool -all= *.mp4
    exiftoll -all= *.MP4      <- it may be case sensitive - don't recall

    https://exiftool.org

    Thank you for that suggestion of exiftool-12.98_64 which I installed, renamed, and ran in the command line (noting that spaces are critical).

    copy with_exif_data.mp4 no_exif_data.mp4 exiftool<space>-all=<space>no_exif_data.mp4
       1 image files updated

    The problem is now I need to test what the difference is in exif data.

    The first program I tried was MediaInfo Version 24.06 from https://mediaarea.net/en/MediaInfo

    Certainly there was a difference but the need is for a program to reliably spit out ALL the metadata so that we can be sure any remaining identifying metadata is wiped clean before a video is uploaded to the web.

    Is there an offline program to spit out all the metadata in a comparable format (like csv or text) so that two outputs can be compared side by side?

    If you want to study video, you can have your video dumped as packets.
    Since your video sample is short, the output won't take up a lot of space.
    If you try this on a two hour movie, you'll run out of space on D: :-)

    C:\FFMPEG\bin\ffprobe -show_packets -show_data F:\high.mp4 > D:\Temp\high_ffprobe_out.txt

    When you do "show_packets", there should be audio packets and video packets,
    as separate items. The packets are interleaved (so the sound track follows
    the video and is lip-synced after a fashion).

    If there are any packet types other than those, that you can see, those
    packets could be metadata.

    The larger size of one of the video packets, is the key frame. Every 12th or 15th frame,
    should be a key frame. The frames in between, are encoded as differences and the size of those frames should be smaller.

    It's hard to say where the metadata would be. The beginning and end of the recording are logical places, but not a guarantee they won't try something else.

    If the packets have 4CC codes, you can use those to sort the packets, with
    grep perhaps.

    Start with the un-stripped video first, so you have a "rich" sample
    to analyze. Then move to the stripped video, to see what remains.

    Even if someone were to write the tool you describe, chances are it
    would not be complete. How many years did the ExifTool person work
    on that software, honing it ? It took forever, to do a good job. Any
    of the other developers who just dash off some code in half-an-hour,
    they won't even be remotely close to being thorough.

    You have to decide, whether the "Title" inside the video, is worth
    chasing or not. That might not be as easy to access or view in a trace
    or with a hex editor. It's always possible that in-band metadata could
    be compressed, but generally, developers don't like to do that. There
    is a preference for easier to parse presentations. But it's childs play
    for them, to stream decoders for that sort of thing, and not a problem
    to compress the stuff anyway. But historically, a preference for readable fields is there.

    You can look at Mozilla bookmarks as an example. Started as .json,
    ended up as .jsonlz4 , which means the text is compressed with a
    light compressor. The compressor is inefficient enough, you can
    still read the text! Now, why would an idiot do that ??? Fuck knows.
    Either you compress the living shit out of something... to save space.
    Or, you don't compress something (it's too small to bother).
    Well, why would you half-compress something ? I couldn't figure that out.

    Paul

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