ffmpeg vfilters at specific timecodes

Question

I want to add a watermark to some videos but I only want the watermark to appear at certain timecodes in the video (e.g. beginning / middle / end) and only for a few seconds

Answer 1

It's still not implemented and I haven't heard about plans for it. I was in this situation a few times before and I came with an ugly, however working solution.

Simply split your video in parts, so for example your video is 30 seconds in length and you want a different watermark to each 10 seconds part, then split your video into 3 parts like this:

ffmpeg -i in.mpg -t 00:00:10 // First 10 seconds
ffmpeg -i in.mpg -ss 00:00:10 -t 00:00:10 // middle 10 seconds
ffmpeg -i in.mpg -ss 00:00:20 -t 00:00:10 // last 10 seconds.

-ss // starting position
-t  // length to process

After you will have 3 parts watermarked, you can simply glue them. For mpg you can use a simple unix CAT tool, because of the mpeg format.

Like this: cat part1.mpg part2.mpg part3.mpg > whole.mpg