Thanks for the quick answer!
I already have a way of generating animations, i.e. I could take the output
of my graphics code and generate 00.png, 01.png ... n.png and later
concatenate that together into a video, but I think that's wasteful if the
objective is to serve RTMP/HTTP on the fly. The pi
libavfilter allows for video generator sources:
http://www.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#Video-Sources
It includes frei0r, and it might be easier to make a frei0r plugin. If you
do, I can check it into frei0r. Then, you can use it with ffmpeg. MLT does
not yet support libavfilter, but it does supp