Android App Development: How to Overlay Video on a Video
Since we live in the epoque of Snapchat, Instagram and other visual social networks, lots of people started to get obsessed with cool and funny video effects. Many companies create corporate channels to promote their services through video content, optimizing it for better ranking. Mobile app developers wonder more and more how to overlay video on a video, what kinds of techs to use and will it be successful at all. That’s why developers of Mobilunity decided to conduct a small test the main idea of which was to record a video with effects using a mobile device so that the process would look like this:
- Firstly, you choose one animated overlay effect from the list.
- Then, you click the button “Slap Me” and the chosen effect is shown on the screen.
- You record the video.
- A complete variant of the video can be saved on the SD card or shared with your friends on social networks
FFmpeg Library for Testing Video Overlay Effects
Our developers decided to use FFmpeg library for this test. If we need to do some transformations or changes in the video – the library has a rich number of filters to choose from. For our task, we have chosen two filters – chroma key and overlay. We have tried to execute the filters in the command line on PC with Windows OS.
Example of applying a chroma key filter
The first example below shows how animated overlay video influences the main video:
ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -i effect.mp4 -filter_complex "[0:v][1:v]overlay=eof_action=pass[out]" -map "[out]" out.mp4
In case we need to remove background color in the video effect – we can use chroma key filter. Next example shows how we can remove background color in the video and overlay effect on it:
ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -i effect.mp4 -filter_complex "[1:v]chromakey=0x12da11:0.2[chromakey_res];[0:v][chromakey_res]overlay=eof_action=pass[out]" -map "[out]" out.mp4
Testing of FFmpeg Library on Android
On Windows, this code works perfectly fine, but we also needed to test FFmpeg library on Android OS. We had two choices to perform this:
- Build FFmpeg’s source code for Android and use NDK to write needed code on C language.
- Use the library which builds the bridge between Java and native C++ libraries.
Firstly we’ve selected the former variant. We tried to build FFmpeg’s source code for Android OS. We checked out several tutorials on how to do this, but there were some issues anyway. We tried to fix these issues but got new ones instead. This is why we finally decided to select the second variant. We’ve created small project for testing, where we tried to use chromakey and overlay filters. After this testing, we found out that chromakey filter doesn’t exist, but it was successfully added after month. Anyway, we had an issue with overlay filter as well. It turned out that this library doesn’t support video overlay effects, it is only capable of overlaying images on the video.
Conclusion
In the realm of Android app development, knowing how to find CTO, collaborate with an SAP C4C developer, and engage a freelance Angular developer can significantly enhance your team’s ability to create innovative solutions, such as overlaying video on a video. Based on our research we understood that creating an application with video overlay effects takes a lot of time. Most of the applications don’t need to be written with the help of the libraries on C language. If your application performs much calculus, in this case, you may consider using such types of libraries, but you need to be very careful because it complicates your code much and as a result, you won’t be able to debug the function which was written on C language.
We conduct different types of experiments in order to gain more experience in mobile app development and provide high quality and trendy mobile solutions to our clients. Being experts in web and mobile development, we are offering great solutions for different types of businesses, so that they could choose the best-fitting model of development, whether it’s outstaffing (dedicated teams for hire) or outsourcing an idea to Mobilunity.
Reasons to Hire Mobile App Developers
If you have read our post and still have a difficult time incorporating overlay effects to your videos on your applications or websites, or you want something a bit more complicated, we highly advise hiring professional mobile developers. While working on an Android app development project that involves overlaying video on a video, consider collaborating with an iOS freelance developer and leveraging web development consulting services to ensure a seamless cross-platform experience for users. These developers are not only skilled in mobile application developments, but also in improving and integrating effects into videos that can be added to mobile applications. Hiring mobile developers to work with you, provides you with the opportunity to not just improve your videos but also customize it to what you need. Many companies search for Android programmer for hire or mobile app developers in Israel, Romania, Switzerland, Cyprus, and much more. But why going any further? Here at Mobilunity, we offer the services, both outstaffing (or hire dedicated android developers) and outsourcing, of our mobile app developers. Our mobile developers are both skilled and experienced in addressing video overlay problems but also collaborating with clients on customizing videos overlay effects to their needs. Our dedicated mobile developers can provide high quality and efficient solutions to your video overlay effects problems at a manageable cost!
Hire our remote mobile developers in order to get a top-notch app on Android or iOS.
All salaries and prices mentioned within the article are approximate NET numbers based on the research done by our in-house Recruitment Team. Please use these numbers as a guide for comparison purposes only and feel free to use the contact form to inquire on the specific cost of the talent according to your vacancy requirements and chosen model of engagement.
