Newbie here so go easy on me. I have cut a video from one of my DVDs using Xilisoft video converter in avi format. I am quite pleased with the quality.
I just want to add small text at the start and in the middle of the video, how can I achieve this without loosing the current quality of the video? Any help would be really appreciated as all tutorials I've found are of embedding subtites in the video via a subtitle file.
You can do that in any of the "Movie making" software, including Windows Movie Maker, DVD SlideShow GUI ( http://download.videohelp.com/tin2tin/index.html ), or NeroVision if you have Nero. However, you will lose some quality, since encoding will be required.
If you don't want to re-encode, then you'd have to make your own subtitles. That should be fairly easy, since you only have some text in certain parts of the video.
EDIT:
This program might be the easiest of all(it is free), I would work directly on the DVD source to avoid quality loss by encoding twice(cut the video/add the text in one step):
If you don't want the text embedded (permanent) you either use a .srt file (which has to be present with the video) or you mux the text (.srt file again) using AviAddXSubs.
AviAddXSubs muxes (does not encode) the subtitle as another stream.
A standalone DivX player will show the subtitles, however for display on a PC, DivX player has to be installed.
Both of the above assumes that subs are turned on for the player - which may not suit.
Another option is to use VirtualDub and a logo filter.
You create the text as a bmp then use the 'Curve Editor' feature to only display the text (.bmp) at specified frames.
This ensures that only the specified frames are encoded, thus the majority of the video is saved without encoding - much faster.
