FFMPEG filters provide a powerful way to programmatically enhance or alter videos, and it’s fairly simple to add a watermark to a video using the overlay filter. The easiest way to install ffmpeg is to download a pre-built binary for your specific platform. Then you don’t have to worry about including and installing all the right dependencies and codecs you will be using.

Here’s a short video I took while mountain biking that we’ll be working with.



Once you have ffmpeg installed, adding a watermark is as easy as passing your existing source through an overlay filter like so:

ffmpeg -i birds.mp4 -i watermark.png -filter_complex "overlay=10:10" birds1.mp4

Basically, we’re passing in the original video, and an overlay image as inputs, then passing it through the filter, and saving the output as birds1.mp4.

We specify a specific position of the overlay in pixels – 10:10 puts the video 10 pixels from the top and 10 pixels from the right. (x:y coordinates)

Here is our result:



In some cases you might not know the exact dimensions of the videos you’ll be watermarking. Fortunately, there are variables you can use to better position your watermark depending on the size of the video. These variables include:

main_h – the video’s height

– the video’s height main_w – the video’s width

– the video’s width overlay_h – the overlay’s height

– the overlay’s height overlay_w – the overlay’s width

Using these variable we can position the watermark right in the center of the video like so:

ffmpeg -i birds.mp4 -i watermark.png \ -filter_complex "overlay=x=(main_w-overlay_w)/2:y=(main_h-overlay_h)/2" birds2.mp4

If we wanted to add branding or a watermark to the clip but not cover the existing video, we can use the pad filter to add some padding to our clip, and then position our watermark over the padding like so:

ffmpeg -i birds.mp4 -i watermark2.png \ -filter_complex "pad=height=ih+40:color=#71cbf4,overlay=(main_w-overlay_w)/2:main_h-overlay_h" \ birds3.mp4

Once you start getting the hang of this, you can even animate your overlays!

ffmpeg -i birds.mp4 -i watermark.png \ -filter_complex "overlay='if(gte(t,1), -w+(t-1)*200, NAN)':(main_h-overlay_h)/2" birds4.mp4

That’s it! Simple. Please leave comments below if you have any questions!