Your Video Loses Its Credential on Upload. Readers Can Now Get It Back.
Platforms strip Content Credentials when they re-encode video. A video signed through Trusteddit is registered at signing time, and the free Verifieddit extension can now find that record again from the stripped copy, in the reader’s own browser.
You sign a video. You publish it. Within the hour it has been uploaded somewhere else, re-encoded, and the Content Credential you attached is gone. The pictures travel. Your name does not.
For photographs we have had an answer to that for some time. For video, until this week, a stripped copy was simply a file with no credentials, and a reader had no way to ask where it came from.
What changed this week
Verifieddit, the free and open-source extension readers use to check Content Credentials, now recovers the credential of a stripped video. Version 1.4 is live for Firefox and is in review at the Chrome Web Store.
A reader right-clicks a video that carries no credentials and chooses Verify. The extension takes one frame from the middle of the clip, works out a short fingerprint of it, and asks a public registry whether a signed original matches. If one does, your credential opens: who signed, when, and what was declared. The video never leaves the reader’s browser. Only the fingerprint is sent.
What makes your video findable
Recovery finds only what was registered when it was signed. That part happens on our side. Every video signed through Trusteddit gets a durable credential: an imperceptible watermark, and fingerprints of a frame taken three ways, from the whole picture, from its centre, and from a vertical slice. All of them are registered with the credential.
The three fingerprints are there for a reason. A copy with its edges cropped, or cut down to portrait for a phone, can still be matched against what you published. We have tested re-encoding and both kinds of crop in our own lab. We have not yet published results platform by platform, and we will not claim them until we have.
What the reader is told
A recovered credential is shown as recovered, in words. The reader is told the label had been removed and was found again by resemblance, and when more than one registered record matches, all of them are listed. We think that candour is what makes the result worth anything. It is your name on the line, and a claim that overstates itself would cost you more than no claim at all.
Long-form video is covered too. The extension reads the credential of a file of several gigabytes from its own part of the file and checks the rest as it streams. Until that check is done, the badge stays amber.