Work / Tool · 2021
Video Counter
An Adazing tool for church and event countdowns: the user picks a background video, a timer style and a message, and downloads a video such as a 5-minute pre-service countdown. Common combinations are served pre-rendered from S3, custom text is burned in by a background FFmpeg job, and the page polls until the render is ready; the FFmpeg recipes draw a live mm:ss countdown over a looped background video. I wrote it in plain PHP with a jQuery front end.
- employer
- tool
- client anonymized
- archived
- Client
- Video Counter
- Type
- Tool · Media processing: countdown video generator
- Built with
- PHP, jQuery, FFmpeg, AWS S3
- Last active
- 2021
What it does
- Choice of background video, timer texture and message, served from pre-rendered variants.
- Custom text burned into the video by a background FFmpeg job.
- Live mm:ss countdown computed in the FFmpeg filter graph.
- Polling download flow and a custom background upload.
How it is built
- No framework and no database: a PHP page posts the user's choices to a render script. Known combinations resolve to pre-built videos on S3; custom text starts a detached FFmpeg job, and the page polls a file check until the output exists.
Decisions
- Compute the countdown inside the FFmpeg filter graph (drawtext expressions) instead of generating frames.
Skills
- Media processing with FFmpeg filter graphs
- Render caching (pre-rendered variants on S3)
