How to display date (text overlay) on GStreamer Video Stream?

Question

Currently I can display the local time text (clock overlay) on the video stream.

gst-launch-1.0 v4l2src ! videoconvert ! 'video/x-raw,width=640,height=480' ! clockoverlay ! ximagesink

I am struggling to find out a way to display the current date (assuming local time zone).

I am sure I can do this by writing my own plugin. However, is there one in the stock or work arounds to avoid reinventing the wheel? Any ideas?

Answer 1

Check out gst-inspect-1.0 clockoverlay. If you do that you will notice the following option:

  time-format         : Format to use for time and date value, as in strftime.
                        flags: readable, writable
                        String. Default: "%H:%M:%S"

So as you see you can just set this to whatever you want following the strftime format. Check out http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/ctime/strftime/ for details.

So a simple way for you would be to use:

gst-launch-1.0 v4l2src ! videoconvert ! 'video/x-raw,width=640,height=480' ! \
clockoverlay time-format="%D %H:%M:%S" ! ximagesink

And you will have the date in the overlay as well. Feel free to design the text-format string to your liking.