Comments on: ASCII Movies

By: Marko

Marko — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 12:15:02 +0000

I got it! It works well with:

vlc -V caca movie.avi

By: Marko

Marko — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 16:21:24 +0000

It works well when playing in X, but when I go to real terminal (tty1) it plays the movie, but it doesn’t go smooth. The pictures blanks constantly and a whole image of frame is never rendered, only some some parts… wierd

I tried this on 3 different computers and there is always the same result.

By: 12 killer apps for linux

12 killer apps for linux — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 04:27:26 +0000

[...] mplayer is a light weight, full featured media player. In fact it’s so light weight, it doesn’t even bother with a gui. Just run it from a terminal, and up pops a simple window showing the video and the video only. Manipulating the video (fast forward, pause, toggling subtitles, volume controls etc) is done through keyboard commands, which quickly become second nature. Mplayer plays any video or audio codec/container you can name and supports a number of display drivers, including displaying video on a terminal using ascii. [...]

By: surf a slow internet connection like a boss

surf a slow internet connection like a boss — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 21:31:55 +0000

[...] videos in ascii – check out this page for a howto on that. If you like the idea of playing videos in ascii art in general, check out this howto. browser, lynx, opera, slow [...]

By: B

Sat, 05 Mar 2011 16:21:40 +0000

This is great! But I have a question. How would I go about saving/encoding the ascii video? I know I could use a screen/video capturing program, but is there a way that I could use Mplayer to save/encode this directly?

By: eric

eric — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 03:49:26 +0000

ok so i was trying that with an avi. When i tried it with an mp4, it plays audio, but it says there is no video. also, when i do mplayer -vohelp, it lists the accepted video outputs, aa and caca are not on the list.

By: eric

eric — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 03:22:57 +0000

hey there. i have mplayer install on my mac using darwinports, yes, it is the command line version. I also installed aalib and libcaca. when i try both of your commands i get an “error opening/initializing the selected video_out (-vo) device.” when i try opening that same file with the quartz video out it works. im guessing the libraries arent fully compatible or something?

By: Jani

Jani — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 08:51:57 +0000

From mplayer’s man page:

“HINT: You probably have to specify -monitorpixelaspect. Try ‘mplayer -vo aa -monitorpixelaspect 0.5′.”

This worked for me.

By: fred

fred — Mon, 31 May 2010 20:08:39 +0000

try to resize the window if you are using the x11 driver

By: tony

tony — Sat, 22 May 2010 07:29:21 +0000

I guess no one out there knows why I only get half images?