How to make a customized video

Question

I'd like to be able to write some code so that given a name and a video, I can personalize the video with that person's name in it.

Eg, I want to send my family's Christmas message which is a video of us doing silly things and with a video overlay that says Merry Christmas, !

Ideally, I'd like to do this in C#.NET but am open to other technologies if they exist.

Many thanks.

Answer 1

The ffmpeg utility (https://www.ffmpeg.org) can do this type of thing - you should be able to find examples if you Google text or video overlays with ffmpeg:

Overlaying images on a video:

• https://video.stackexchange.com/a/12111
• https://superuser.com/a/683696

Overlaying text:

• https://stackoverflow.com/a/10919953/334402
• https://superuser.com/a/701206 (includes a watermark)

The above are all done on the command line. To include them into your c# program you can:

• invoke the command line from your program
• use a c# wrapper around the ffmpeg command line functionality
• Directly use the libraries that ffmpeg uses

The best compromise may be the wrapper option. These exist for different languages and environments, but some examples for c#:

• http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/774093/Another-FFmpeg-exe-Csharp-Wrapper
• http://www.ffmpeg-csharp.com (this one is not free so check the licence...)