For a new effect that adds a time stamp, should the video metadata be read by openshot-qt or by libopenshot

[mlell]

I am trying to burn in a timestamp into my video. I tried it first and I think I can succeed using the caption effect, however, it would be much nicer if I would not need to enter SRT-formatted captions that show the current time of the clip, especially when cutting clips it will save a lot of time.

I am not very familiar to C++ but I feel that almost all the building blocks are there for me to try to build an effect that will show the current time as could be written in pseudo-code as format_time("Recording time from the clip metadata" + ("number of frames"/"frames_per_sec")).

I think I would just need to copy and modify the Caption effect, adding a way to read the metadata out of the clip and use it to provide the text to display on the output. A few questions:

• I am not sure if I can do it, given the time besides my day job and my knowledge but if I would succeed, would this project even benefit from it?
• Should the extraction of the metadata be done by libopenshot or openshot-qt (which would then pass it to libopenshot as an effect parameter)?
• Do you happen to know a way to extract metadata from video files that you are willing to add as a dependency to the project?