Integrating Dynamic Text into a Video

Question

Hi All,

Not sure if this is possible...

Basically I have a video of someone holding a white board that I would like to add a message onto, based on what a user wants. So for instance someone could enter their name "Dave" and then the it would automatically generate a video with the words "Hi Dave" on the white board. The board currently moves slightly so it would be good to have the text move with the board so it looks like it is actually written on the board. I understand that I would be able to edit the movie manually and add the appropriate text, but I need to be able to do this automatically.

From here I would then email the video so this doesn't need to be done on the fly. One thought I had could be to make it in flash then convert the flash file back to a wmv or avi file. But I would prefer to just work in wmv/avi.

So the question I have is, is this possible? and how would I accomplish this?

Thanks in advance for all the help!!! -Jason

Answer 1

Well, you're probably going to need to decode each frame of the video, apply the text or other filtering, and re-encode the video to the desired output format. For programmatic decoding/encoding, you might want to check out libavformat, libavcodec, and libavutil (parts of the ffmpeg project). You can use them to decode each frame to a picture, where you can make whatever changes you want. If you want the text to move, then just put it in different places/angles whatever in different frames.