Changelog

20 September 2026

Guides

Added a guides section: twelve write-ups on how the Gemini, Veo and NotebookLM marks are constructed, how each one is removed, what a browser re-encode costs in measured decibels, and where the method stops working. Most of it is material that previously existed only as comments in the source.

3 September 2026

A clip with no watermark is now reported as such

Previously a clip whose mark had already been removed would still be processed, costing a generation of quality to produce a file identical in every way that matters. Detection now distinguishes an absent mark from a faint one and says so rather than re-encoding.

The calibration behind it: a clip that carries the mark scores around 0.87 at the correct position, and an already-cleaned clip peaks around 0.3 at every candidate position.

The Notebook mark is found on portrait exports

Portrait NotebookLM exports reported no mark at all. They draw the wordmark about 1.45 times the size the landscape rule predicts and set it further in from the corner, so the predicted box never correlated above threshold and sat just outside the search radius.

Fixed with per-orientation layouts, a size sweep in the locator, a per-column background estimate in the frame detector and a row-aware stroke rebuild. Written up in the NotebookLM wordmark is a different problem.

The encoder is no longer told the picture is a screen

The export path set a content hint of detail, which Chrome's software H.264 encoder reads as screen content. On camera footage that stalls rate control at roughly a quarter of the requested bitrate. Removing it gained 4.1 dB on a Veo clip and 5.8 dB on a NotebookLM export.

The measurements are in measuring what a browser re-encode costs you.

The mark's strength is followed through fades

A clip fading in from black carries the mark at reduced strength for the first second. Treating those frames as full strength subtracted more than had been added and left a dark diamond in the corner. Strength is now estimated per frame and tracked across the clip, so a frame in a fade is understood as part of a fade rather than judged alone.

1 September 2026

The mark is located rather than assumed

Detection previously trusted the position predicted from the frame size. It now searches for the mark near that prediction and scores the candidate removal before committing, which absorbs the small offsets introduced by a crop or a transcode.

NotebookLM tail trimming became conditional

NotebookLM exports end with a few seconds of outro, and that tail was being cut unconditionally. It is now cut only when a Notebook mark was actually found, so a clip from anywhere else keeps its last three seconds.

Bundles are split, and stale entries no longer served

The removal engine is well over 400 KB and neither tool page needs it to render, so the entry bundles are now small and pull the engine in on first use. A deploy could previously serve a cached entry bundle naming chunks the new deploy had already deleted, which failed with nothing the visitor could act on. The service worker no longer serves entry bundles ahead of the network.

The NotebookLM wordmark is handled

NotebookLM exports carry a "Gemini Notebook" wordmark rather than the Gemini sparkle. It is opaque, so there is no blend to invert. The covered strip is instead rebuilt by interpolating each column between the clean pixels above and below it, which measured an excess roughness of +0.2 against +13.3 for fitting and inverting a matte.

28 August 2026

New engine, video support, redesign

The vendored removal engine was replaced with upstream v1.0.41, which brought the size catalogue, the alpha variants and the multi-pass candidate evaluation the detector now relies on. A video tool was added alongside the image one, decoding and re-encoding entirely in the browser through WebCodecs. The site was redesigned around the two tools.

Earlier

Before August 2026 the site was image only, with batch processing added in March 2026 and the first version of the removal running directly in the page. The privacy policy, terms, about and contact pages date from March 2026.