Who was Thomas Bowdler?
Thomas Bowdler (1754–1825) was an English physician who, in 1818, published The Family Shakespeare — an edition of Shakespeare’s plays with the bawdy language and risqué passages excised, so that “nothing is added to the original text; but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family.”
The verb bowdlerize is named after him. It’s not always a compliment — and the editors of The Family Shakespeare were criticized at the time and after. But the underlying idea is durable: people sometimes want to share media with their families that, in the original, contains content they’d rather skip.
This project is the same idea, two centuries later, applied to video files on your own hard drive.
What this is
A local, GPU-accelerated tool that detects nudity and profanity in video files and produces a family-friendly version by blurring sensitive regions and muting offending words.
It runs entirely on your own machine. Frames stay in CUDA memory from NVDEC decode through inference through the blur compositor. No upload, no cloud inference, no telemetry.
What this isn’t
- Not a service. No web UI, no API, no SaaS. The CLI is the whole product.
- Not a distribution platform. It does not strip DRM, redistribute media, or alter anything you don’t already own.
- Not for redistribution. The output is for personal viewing in your own household. You hold the copyright on neither the input nor the output.
- Not a perfect filter. Detection is good but not infallible. The
reviewstep is a first-class part of the workflow precisely because human judgment beats a 320×320 ONNX model on edge cases.
Personal use only
bowdler is published as personal-use software. No license is granted for redistribution, hosting as a service, or commercial use.
If you’re reading this and want to build something similar for your own household — go for it. If you want to wrap it in a paid service, please don’t.