I have four files with text that I need to overlay to a vidoe image. Can anybody help me as to what would be the easiest and most efficient way to do this. The files are updated each second so the code to overlay the text would have to take into account reading and printing a file each second. Can anybody help with this????

You may use an opengl rendering. For the files you can create an
glRect in the size of your video image. This can be made transparent, so
that the video image is shown. The text may be written with glText to the
glRect and updated every second.

If you have another way to display your video images, maybe there are
capabilities for adding images, text to the rendering contex.t.

would it be possible for you to give me some coding example for how to do that type of thing?

Sorry, not really. However, SGI has the glut library (for c / c++) which
provides some framework for creating open gl rendering context. You would need OpenGL support and the glut library installed.

There are some examples provided on there site. This one:
http://www.sgi.com/products/software.../source/abgr.c

Image:
http://www.sgi.com/products/software...mages/abgr.jpg

creates a image and displays it in ABGR AND RGBA modes. However, it will
not be very easy to understand, when you have no ideas about open gl. And this does not solves the text drawing problem for now.

Maybe you can find some more information in open GL forums.