Filed under: Terminal Tips
Terminal Tip: ASCII-ify your Videos
I'm kind of on an ASCII kick this weekend. Having already brought you ASCII banners, I thought I'd follow that up with ASCII video playback. Apple's ASCII Movie Player, which you can download here, allows you to view any QuickTime compatible media from the Terminal. Above, you see last week's episode of Heroes--that's Peter, in case you didn't recognize him from the screen shot.
The ASCII Movie Player disk image contains a compiled Universal Binary application file. This means you don't need any developer tools to compile or run this utility. Drag a copy into your favorite folder (it doesn't have to be /Applications; /usr/local/bin might make more sense), launch Terminal, navigate to the executable and run it from the command line. e.g. % ./ASCIIMoviePlayer /Volumes/Data/Downloads/Heroes/X22-Heroes.m4v
With ASCII Movie Player, you can play any media that works with QuickTime. So if you've got Perian installed, for example, you can ascii-fy your DivX or Xvid videos as well as your MPEG-4s and QuickTime MOVs, and so forth. And, since QuickTime also allows you to open and display still images, you can use ASCIIMoviePlayer to load and display most digital photographs.
As a rule of thumb, display looks best with white-on-black rather than Terminal's default black-on-white. To switch this, select Terminal -> Window Settings, choose Color from the Inspector pop-up and update the Normal Text and Background Color settings.
Update: colorized version can be found here.
Update 2: Both Mplayer and VLC provide ASCII art output using the -libcaca module. (Caca stands for Color AsCii Art.) In VLC, use Settings > Preferences > Video > Output modules > Advanced options > Video output module > Color ASCII art video output (courtesy of JeffreyAtW over at Digg). More details here. In MPlayer, the AAlib supports black and white ASCII conversion and cacalib supports full color ASCII. Details here. mplayer -vo aa videoname or use mplayer -vo caca videoname for color ASCII (but with a performance hit due to the colors).
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Vidd said 10:10AM on 5-20-2007
This is so strange, why did Apple make this?
It should be a default part of the terminal!
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mathmonkey said 10:46AM on 5-20-2007
I've seen websites built around distributing films this way. It's a neat way to provide content without needing a huge amount of bandwidth, legality aside.
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Niles said 10:58AM on 5-20-2007
An iChat filter of this would be amazing.
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RK said 11:36AM on 5-20-2007
Pretty darn cool.
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Alex said 11:49AM on 5-20-2007
MPlayer ( http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/news.html ) has supported that for a while with the aalib library. You can install it via Fink, and it will play ANYTHING. It's like VLC, only more hacker-y.
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Dave Zatz said 11:50AM on 5-20-2007
But how can I create or export ASCII movies?
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Ed said 12:03PM on 5-20-2007
See http://jose.abc.fr/cinema/index.htm for some interesting examples :)
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jcb said 12:41PM on 5-20-2007
mplayer will also play ascii-art movies in colour with the caca video output codec
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jitaroo said 1:16PM on 5-23-2007
hmm... is that peter petrelli of heroes i see?
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Brian said 3:55PM on 5-20-2007
I think this (found in one of the documents in the download) will shed a little bit of light onto the origins of the terminal player.
/* Top X Tips for better ASCII QuickTime Movie Viewing
10) Grow your terminal/console to fit the Movie
9) Ask marketing folks if you can incorporate this code into your latest QuickTime product
and see if they think you're serious, then do it behind their back anyway
8) Set your terminal to White on Black for optimal look
7) Download your favorite movie trailer
6) While you're at it, download some Graphics Importer sample code (why not?)
5) Jedi mind trick your manager "...you want to send me to WWDC"
4) Order the pizza.
3) Dim the lights and turn up the audio
2) Turn off terminal transparancy for fastest performance
1a) Usage [smelltheglove:/Volumes/Spock] moof% ASCIIMoviePlayer sillymovie.mov
1b) Usage C:\ ASCIIMoviePlayer.exe sillymovie.mov
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FezMan88 said 10:15PM on 5-20-2007
If someone could make an in depth tutorial for this they would be my friend forever. I havent used command prompts since i was a kid
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FezMan88 said 11:52PM on 5-20-2007
Because when i run it according to what you say, it says "Bus Error"
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Frank Bitterlich said 2:49PM on 5-21-2007
Shamelesss plug - I hope you don't mind :) I have just released version 2 of Moving ASCII, a little application that converts movies and still images to ASCII art (in either image, text, or movie form). Freeware. Available at .
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Frank Bitterlich said 2:58PM on 5-21-2007
Ah, sorry, the link was swallowed. Moving ASCII is avialable here:
http://frankbitterlich.gotdns.com/
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Shenlon said 11:45PM on 5-21-2007
Yeah, there's the whole VLC and MPlayer thing... but seriously. It's a movie from the Terminal. I mean, who ever heard of watching movies at a command prompt? This is way cooler than those other ones.
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Frank Bitterlich said 11:12AM on 5-22-2007
I agree, you can't deny the collness factor. :)
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Macskeeball said 2:00PM on 5-26-2007
I just used this to watch the music video for Weird Al's "White & Nerdy." Kind of ironic if you ask me.
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