Raspberry Pi Forums

Is it possible to write text into video files in raspberry pi?

What do you mean? Write text so it appears overlayed on the video stream and is recorded with it? Or just overlayed when played back or displayed?

jamesh wrote:What do you mean? Write text so it appears overlayed on the video stream and is recorded with it? Or just overlayed when played back or displayed?

Write text so that it is recorded continuously with the video stream

What kind of text did you have in mind??

There are 2 ways of mixing text with video frames either by software rendering i.e. overlay or by re-encoding your video file to include text.
Overlay is possible with XBMC I have video files with SRT subtitles so I can confirm this is at least supported.
As for re-encoding I believe ffmpeg can burn in SSA subtitling text but there are no GPU accelerated builds so it would take an eternity to run on the Pi.

Richard S.

redhawk wrote:What kind of text did you have in mind??

There are 2 ways of mixing text with video frames either by software rendering i.e. overlay or by re-encoding your video file to include text.
Overlay is possible with XBMC I have video files with SRT subtitles so I can confirm this is at least supported.
As for re-encoding I believe ffmpeg can burn in SSA subtitling text but there are no GPU accelerated builds so it would take an eternity to run on the Pi.

Richard S.

Thanks for the suggestions!

I have a requirement to time stamp my videos/still images. The date command output needs to be continuously (in a one second interval) mixed with the video. Without GPU accelerated builds , time stamping at encoding time is not an option, overlay text is the only option but date command output and the video will have to be synchronized in the case of overlay.

Create a sub titles file for you videos. I've never done that myself, so you have to search the web for exact syntax.