Adding Text to a Video File with ffmpeg

By burning text subtitles into a video, we can use ffmpeg as a quick and dirty way of adding text to a video. Let us say we want to add text to the video original.mp4, which is rendered a .gif below

Then we simply specify a subtitle file of the format .ass(Advanced Substation Alpha), and feed it to ffmpeg as follows:

ffmpeg -y -i original.mp4 -vf subtitles=text.ass original_with_subs.mp4

and this gives us a video with text added:

The file text.ass can be found in the repo, and it contains explanatory comments. The specification of the subtitle format can be found here.