from Hacker News

Show HN: ASCII TV – Stream ASCII movies in your terminal with curl

by mraison on 1/20/19, 4:20 PM with 24 comments

  • by m45t3r on 1/20/19, 9:29 PM

    Not ASCII, however a cool hack using mpv is that it can display actual videos in a terminal emulator that supports true color output [1]. Just run the following command:

      mpv -vo tct video_file.mkv
    Reduce the font size to increase resolution. Also, a GPU accelerated terminal like Kitty [2] is recommended, or the video will be painfully slow.

    [1]: https://gist.github.com/XVilka/8346728

    [2]: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/

  • by graetzer on 1/20/19, 6:11 PM

    I think you can also just use telnet to see star wars:

      telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

  • by jamiek88 on 1/20/19, 6:02 PM

    Now this is hacker news!!

    Ludicrous on the surface yet brilliant.

    Kudos to the creator, and it’s great that such a senior engineer with his track record and contributions still has that spirit in him.

  • by ineedasername on 1/20/19, 8:43 PM

    Practical applications are irrelevant, this is a fun, cool project. I love seeing this sort of thing on HN.

  • by O1111OOO on 1/20/19, 6:41 PM

    Really like the format of the "movie" file. Very easy to work with:

    Line 1: time.Duration

    Lines 2-14: frameHeight (currently set to 13 lines in the code on this and the original[0])

    Options for (1) pause/play (2) back: frame by frame (3) forward: frame by frame : could make this a pretty good presentation app, ebook tool, story-teller...

    [0] https://github.com/nitram509/ascii-telnet-server

  • by hsx on 1/21/19, 1:32 AM

    This is really neat!

    While we're on the topic of neat things you can do with `curl`, check out:

      curl parrot.live

  • by CloudNetworking on 1/20/19, 8:27 PM

    A colleague and I did this at uni in 2001 or so. SSH to his box at home with a TV receiver and a video library that output ASCII graphics.

  • by userbinator on 1/20/19, 7:17 PM

    It's surprising that with the ultra-high-resolution monitors common today, this might actually be on the verge of being practical.