Skip to main content
Open In Colab Video files are not very flexible if we want to change the flow and insert another video at a certain place. Imagine putting a video advertisement on your video stream for your customers. You don’t need to edit the video file and create another one. VideoDB simplifies it for you. It gives you power to build contextualize Ad insertion and personalized Ad insertion on your videos. Dynamic advertisement insertion example showing ad placement in video streams

​
Setup

​
Installing VideoDB in your environment

VideoDB is available as a python package 
!pip install videodb

​
Setting Up a connection to VideoDB

To connect to VideoDB, simply create a Connection object, and connect to the collection. This can be done by either providing your VideoDB API key directly to the constructor or by setting the VIDEO_DB_API_KEY environment variable with your API key. Get your API key from VideoDB Console. Free for first 50 uploads, no credit card required.
import videodb

# Connect to VideoDB
api_key = "your_api_key"
conn = videodb.connect(api_key=api_key)
coll = conn.get_collection()

​
Uploading the videos to VideoDB

Let’s have a base video as Sam Altman’s conversation on OpenAI and AGI. We’ll choose another video to insert in this 👉 (let’s get IBM’s Advertisement). We are going to insert the Ad video into the base video at a specific timestamp. For this, we will need to first upload both the videos to VideoDB. 
base_video_url = "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1cf58VWzt8"
ad_video_url = "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtwduf2lh08"

base_video = coll.upload(url=base_video_url)
ad_video = coll.upload(url=ad_video_url)

​
Inserting Ad in our Base Video

Now that we have both videos uploaded, we’ll use VideoDB’s Editor SDK to create a timeline with multiple clips. We’ll break the base video into segments and insert the ad at the 10-second mark:
  1. Clip 1: Base video from 0 to 10 seconds
  2. Clip 2: Full ad video
  3. Clip 3: Base video continues from 10 seconds to end
from videodb.editor import Timeline, Track, Clip, VideoAsset
from videodb import play_stream

# Define timing
insert_time = 10  # Insert ad at 10 seconds
base_duration = int(base_video.length)
ad_duration = int(ad_video.length)

# Create timeline and track
timeline = Timeline(conn)
track = Track()

# Clip 1: Base video from 0 to insert_time
clip1 = Clip(
    asset=VideoAsset(id=base_video.id),
    duration=insert_time)
track.add_clip(0, clip1)

# Clip 2: Full ad video
clip2 = Clip(
    asset=VideoAsset(id=ad_video.id),
    duration=ad_duration)
track.add_clip(insert_time, clip2)

# Clip 3: Base video continues from insert_time to end
clip3 = Clip(
    asset=VideoAsset(id=base_video.id, start=insert_time),
    duration=base_duration - insert_time)
track.add_clip(insert_time + ad_duration, clip3)

# Generate stream
timeline.add_track(track)
stream_link = timeline.generate_stream()
stream_link is a streaming link that offers instant playback capability – no rendering necessary. ⚡️

​
Play Modified Video

Let’s check the results: 
from videodb import play_stream
play_stream(stream_link)
You can generate as many streaming links as needed for your use-case. This gives you power to personalize your video content for each user.

​
No Limitations

The inserted video doesn’t have to be solely for advertisements; it can be a disclaimer or announcement for the person watching the video. Furthermore, your stream is dynamic, enabling you to adjust the timestamp and insertion video based on your business logic. This is an incredible power to have for any product hosting videos. Let’s master video content manipulation like a pro!

Explore Full Notebook

Open the complete implementation in Google Colab with all code examples.

Brand Elements

Add logos, watermarks, and graphics

Dynamic Streams

Generate multiple versions from one source