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ffmpeg

Showing in-video visual progress bar with FFMPEG?

As OBS Studio lacks a visual indicator to show how far a video has progressed (and when you need to advance to the next scene), I was wondering if there is a command-line option (or solution) to get FFMPEG to re-encode the video and show a progress bar at the bottom of the video that shows how long the video has been playing so far.

Is there such a feature?

Solution

  • Here's a simple 3 second example using an animated overlay:

    progress bar example

    ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -filter_complex "color=c=red:s=1280x10[bar];[0][bar]overlay=-w+(w/10)*t:H-h:shortest=1" -c:a copy output.mp4

    What you will have to change:

    • In the color filter I used 1280 as an example to match the width of input.mp4. You can use ffprobe to get the width or the scale2ref filter to resize to match input.mp4.

    • In the overlay filter I used 10 as an example for the total duration in seconds of input.mp4. You can use ffprobe to get the duration.