With a little more research (and somewhat more knowledge about ffmpeg) I came to the following solution for a stopwatch with a defined decimal precision: * get the framerate via ffprobe and store it in a variable (i.e. !W!) * divide the frame number by this rate * display the result in two parts via text=%%{eif\\:n/!W!\\:d}"."%%{eif\\:n/!W!*100\\:d\\:2} NOTE: I am working under Windows, therefore somewhat exotic escaping in batch files. An offset could easily be accounted for by subtracting a user-provided integer from 'n'. Allowing for printf-style formatting of decimals in drawtext would still be easier ... The whole Windows batch code thus looks like: SETLOCAL EnableDelayedExpansion for /f "tokens=2 delims==/" %%i in ('C:\programme\ffmpeg\bin\ffprobe.exe -v error -of flat^=s^=_ -select_streams v:0 -show_entries stream^=r_frame_rate %1') do set W=%%~i c:\Programme\ffmpeg\bin\ffmpeg -i %1 -y -filter:v "drawtext=fontfile=/Windows/Fonts/arial.ttf:fontcolor=yellow:fontsize=42:text=%%{eif\\:n/!W!\\:d}"."%%{eif\\:n/!W!*100\\:d\\:2}:x=15:y=50" -q 8 -vcodec libxvid %~dpn1_sw%~x1 Wolfgang Hugemann