Who builds NotebookLM Remover
A small, independent project. This page says who maintains it, how the articles here are researched, and how to tell us when we get something wrong.
The maintainer
NotebookLM Remover is maintained by Ray Feng.
Independent developer working on browser-local media tools. Builds the processing engines behind this site — reverse-engineering how NotebookLM, Gemini Notebook and Gemini lay out their export watermarks, then implementing the removal in WebAssembly and Canvas so that files never leave the browser. Writes the technical posts on this blog from the same source code.
What that involves
The work behind this site is mostly reverse engineering. Google does not publish where its watermarks sit, how they are composited, or what changes between export formats, so every one of those details had to be recovered by examining real exported files.
- Pulling apart export formats. Measuring watermark coordinates frame by frame in exported videos, unzipping .pptx archives to find which images actually carry the mark, and comparing Gemini images across output sizes to work out the alpha template being blended in.
- Writing the browser engines. Every tool on the site is hand-written JavaScript running against the Canvas API, FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly, pdf.js, pdf-lib, and JSZip. There is no third-party removal API behind any of it — the algorithms are described in detail on the about page.
- Publishing what turns up. Findings that are useful on their own — exact watermark positions, why SynthID survives visible-watermark removal, which formats keep their text editable — get written up on the blog rather than kept in the codebase.
- Keeping it working. Google changes these exports. When a coordinate moves or a new format appears, the engines need re-measuring against fresh files.
How articles here are researched
Articles are written by the same person who wrote the code they describe. That is the main reason the technical posts can quote exact pixel coordinates and filter arguments: those numbers come out of this project's own source, not from summarising other people's blog posts.
Where an article states a fact about a Google product — an export resolution, a watermark position, a file structure — that fact was checked against an actual exported file before publication. Where an article states a fact about this tool, it was checked against the code.
What "we tested" means on this site
It means exactly one thing: we ran the tool against real export files and looked at the result. It does not mean a lab, a test panel, a controlled study, or a third-party benchmark, and you should not read it that way anywhere on this site.
Concretely, when a post says a method was tested:
- The files were genuine NotebookLM or Gemini exports, not synthetic mock-ups.
- The result was inspected visually, and where a claim is about fidelity rather than appearance, it is derived from the algorithm — the Gemini reversal is called lossless because the arithmetic is invertible, and the audio trim is called lossless because FFmpeg copies the stream rather than re-encoding it.
- Timings are informal observations on ordinary consumer hardware. They will vary with your machine, your browser, and your file size.
- Results depend on the export looking the way it did when we tested. If Google moves a watermark, older posts can go stale before we notice.
Conflicts of interest
Some articles here compare this tool with other watermark removers. We built one of the tools in those comparisons, which is a conflict of interest, and we would rather state it at the top of this page than bury it in a footer. Read those comparisons with that in mind — and check the claims, because the technical ones are specific enough to check.
The site is funded by display advertising, as described on the about page. Coverage is not for sale: no article on this site is paid placement, and no vendor is given approval over anything published here. If that funding model ever changes, this page changes with it.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it. That includes outdated watermark coordinates, a tool behaving differently from how a post describes it, a broken step in a guide, or a comparison that is unfair to another product.
Send corrections through the contact page. Please include the page URL and, if you can, what you saw instead — a specific file format or export type is far more useful than "it did not work". Substantive factual corrections are made to the article itself rather than appended as a note, and the changelog records the change.
Security reports are handled separately: please use the process on the security page.
Elsewhere
- About this project — what the tools do and how each engine works.
- Blog — technical write-ups, format guides, and comparisons.
- Changelog — what changed and when.
- Contact — questions, corrections, feedback.