FFMPEG: how to add watermark to video?

Solution 1:

The correct way to do this with recent ffmpeg is to use the overlay filter. The following command will place watermark.png on top of input.mp4, with the upper-left corner of the watermark fifteen pixels to the right and ten pixels down from the upper-left corner of the main video:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -i watermark.png -filter_complex \
'[0:v][1:v]overlay=15:10[outv]' -map [outv] -map [0:a] \
-c:a copy -c:v libx264 -crf 22 -preset veryfast output.mp4

Obviously, change 15 or 10 to whatever values you want.

There are also a few constants you may find useful, if you're putting watermarks on multiple videos with separate resolutions:

• W and H are the width and height of the main video (input.mp4)
• w and h are the width and height of the overlay video (watermark.png)

These can come in handy many times. For example, to place the watermark over the centre of the video, you could use:

'[0:v][1:v]overlay=(W-w)/2:(H-h)/2[outv]'

Similarly, to centre the watermark over the upper-left sixth of the video:

'[0:v][1:v]overlay=(W-w)/6:(H-h)/6[outv]'

For the lower-left sixth of the video:

'[0:v][1:v]overlay=(W-w)/6:(H-h)/(6/5)[outv]'

You can pretty much do whatever you need to.

See the overlay filter documentation for more information.