More specifically, I'm looking for something like SDL, where you can add objects and render them on a surface. I've searched for "generating video", "video generation", "video generator", but the social networking craze clogged out anything that might be of use, and most of CPAN's video modules are poorly documented.

OpenGL might be of use, but I'm not quite sure whether I need 3D capabilities just to write some text to a screen and render it.

If All Else Fails, there might be a C/C++ library that I could use.