A friend of mine works in e-commerce and often needs to reuse or edit videos that already have text or subtitles burned into them. That got me looking into ways to remove text from video without having to edit it frame by frame.
I tried a few existing tools and APIs, and eventually found Alibaba's VideoDetext. The results were good enough for the kind of videos I was testing, and running the API directly was relatively inexpensive. The underlying API is fairly developer-oriented, though, so I built a simple web interface around it: Video Text Remover.
The current workflow is straightforward: upload a video, let the tool detect the text or select the area you want removed, and process the video.
It's definitely not perfect. From my testing, it works much better when the text is over a relatively simple background. When the text overlaps moving objects or detailed backgrounds, the reconstructed area can still look unnatural.
I'm also still figuring out what the best approach is for more difficult cases. If you've worked with video inpainting or other text-removal models that handle temporal consistency better, I'd be interested to hear what you've tried.
Feedback on the workflow and the output quality would be very useful as well.
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