[gst-devel] future of textoverlay

[David S. <ds...@sc...>]

Inspired by Ronald's screenshots of subtitles, I fixed cairotextoverlay
to look pretty.  It's pretty close to being a drop-in replacement
for textoverlay (based on pango).

I'm planning to make a textoverlay into a base class, so that
people can easily create elements that overlay text onto a video
using their own formatting rules.  In particular, I see several
elements of wide usefulness:

 - (similar to the current textoverlay) prints text at a location
   specified by element properties.  (The current element also
   allows text streaming on a pad.)

 - (similar to the current timeoverlay) prints timestamps on video

 - print text based on a stream of subtitling rules

 - print text based on a stream of closed-captioning rules

 - "crawling" text on the bottom of the video image

 - vertically scrolling text, e.g., movie credits

One could conceivably make a super-element that does all of these
at once, but I don't like elements like that.

If anyone has more ideas along these lines, please let me know.



dave...