Hello. @Chocobozzz
I am trying to add a watermark on every upload and was wondering what the most efficient way would be to achieve this.
Modifying the transcoding step in the yml file or executing the studio api after video upload hook is triggered.
Or if there are other ways that would be more efficient.
Most efficient way to add a hard watermark would be using the watermark plugin. It simply shows an image as overlay in video player. But given that it is a soft watermark, it may not be exactly what you are looking for.
In simplest form, this is an image viewer over the video. Watermark image should is preferably a PNG with transparency that has the same aspect ratio as the video.
This can be achieved in PeerTube with the use of « player-watermark » plugin. but it is still very early in its development. To be frank, I would call it a proof of concept as of 2025 March.
Hard watermarks are added into the video during video editing, and become part of the video, persisting even if the video was downloaded. It is difficult to remove the watermark out of a published video.
If you are implementing a watermark into your videos in a video editor before uploading them to PeerTube, you can customize them in every way you would want, with moving or growing effects, or becoming visible some of the time etc. I personally recommend this way of adding watermarks.
PeerTube has a Video Studio, which in theory allows hard adding watermarks, but I cannot recommend it since I was never successful with it. It probably is in pre-alpha stage of its development, and we should avoided using it in production servers.
If you still want to give it a try, try it on a private testing video that you are going to delete either way.
