A MPEG-4 compressed domain video watermarking method is proposed and its performance is studied at video bit rates ranging from 64 Kb/s to 900 Kb/s. The watermark is inserted by modifying Discrete Cosine Transformation (DCT) coefficients. The strength of watermark is changed according to local frame characteristics to reduce impact on visual quality. The algorithm’s performance is also studied for watermarking bits in a frame ranging from 1 Kb/frame to 3 Kb/frame. The watermark is attack-free against attacks like scaling, rotation and cropping even if blind-techniques are used.