ASCII QuickTime Movie Player

EccentricAnomaly writes "Do you wish you had some more CLUI multimedia apps? Well, over at Mac OS X Hints I found this link to Apple's sample code for an ASCII QuickTime movie player. So grab some popcorn, make Terminal full screen, and watch some movie trailers the way ubergeeks were truly meant to." You can watch movies over remote login to another box, too, though the sound will come out of the host computer, not the client ...

Comments

Big Movies...

[Anonymous Coward]

Since each character represents a single pixel in the movie, you may want to switch the monitor to its highest possible resolution.

ASCII pr0n

[Anonymous Coward]

Is better than the real thing!

Funnies in the source code

[aster_ken]

Read the source code to get the "Top X Tips for better ASCII QuickTime Movie Viewing". I particularly like number nine.

Re:Funnies in the source code

[Anonymous Coward]

/* Top X Tips for better ASCII QuickTime Movie Viewing
10) Grow your terminal 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
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.
4) Dim the lights and turn up the audio
2) Turn off terminal transparancy for fastest performance
1) Usage [smelltheglove:/Volumes/Spock] moof% ASCIIMoviePlayer sillymovie.mov
*/

Make the font size tiny

[IRNI]

It makes the images look better. I expanded the terminal full screen, then I made the font a monotype and made it very small with the command keys to shrink the font size. Eventually I could make out butters' mom painting over his face.

Re:Make the font size tiny

[Slur]

Since I have very tiny arms and can't reach my keyboard to perform such complex feats of preference mastery I used my relatively normal-sized legs to kick my office chair away from the desk and got the same result.

Question

[Anonymous Coward]

To enable the ASCIIMoviePlayer functionality I need to move the binary in to the /usr/bin directory, yes?

or would it be the /bin directory?

- anonymous Un0x n00b

Re:Question

[jweatherley]

You could do either - alternatively run it from wherever you built it by putting './' in front of the executable name:

bash-2.05a$ ./ASCIIMoviePlayer pr0n.mov

Also doable with mplayer

[palfrey]

mplayer has had ascii output for quite a while (as long as I've known about mplayer. And as announced here mplayer just announced support for sorenson V3, so you can play quicktime (and practically every other video format under the sun...). Quite happy running on OS X (as well as most *nix'es)

Re:Also doable with mplayer

[0x0d0a]

However, mplayer uses aalib, which doesn't require a one letter per pixel ratio (though it could certainly do so...).

Re:Also doable with mplayer

[Valdrax]

How, exactly, do you get this to work. I've used fink to install mplayer and all its requisites, but I never get anything but a blank screen with a few commands and a timecode at the top no matter what options I specify with "-vo aa." Any suggestions would be helpful.

Re:Also doable with mplayer

[WiseWeasel]

Just grab the OS X native binaries from versiontracker.com . . .

Of course . . .

[cjpez]

. . . once a new version of MPlayer comes out, we can do that on Linux, too. AAlib output + Sorenson input = fun!

repost

[tadheckaman]

REPOST! now somebody needs to make a slashdot bot that can replace editors...

Re:repost

[EccentricAnomaly]

I did a search for 'ascii' and didn't find one. Could you give a link to the other story?

already been done

[spatula]

You know, it's funny that Apple did this, but it's been done before. Install aalib and mplayer, then try "mplayer -vo aa" sometime. It would be interesting to do a side-by-side comparison of the two to see which one produces more convincing ASCII art.

sourceforge project

[hayne]

There is a sourceforge project dedicated to improving this ASCII movie player:
http://quickascii.sourceforge.net/
Main differences so far seem to be command-line options.

Re:sourceforge project

[RevAaron]

:( I get a bus error on 10.1.

Re:sourceforge project

[goon america]

My project!

I'm working on ASCII output for audio files. Apple has a demo of a Quicktime-based graphic equalizer here, and I'm working on converting it to output in ASCII. I only opened the project about a week and a half ago.

There are countless possible improvements, so if you have a clever idea join the project or send me a patch with your work.

Why not make a 'sound pipe'?

[Stonehead]

You can watch movies over remote login to another box, too, though the sound will come out of the host computer, not the client..

Can't this be fixed once and for all, by adding some sound channel to X? I'm just forgetting all the legal DRM implications for ease. Technically it's possible, just like videoconferencing in proprietary formats like Real.

Re:Why not make a 'sound pipe'?

[JohnFluxx]

Well, one way to do it is to run a sound server on the remote machine, and then tell the sound server on the local machine to forward the sound to the remote server. This is just about doable.
One problem is that there are several sound servers, including esd and arts. The plan originaly was to switch to arts only. (The job of a sound server mainly is to mix multiple inputs) This would mean that gnome etc uses arts..
However, the wonderful alsa ppl included many of the features of the sound server directly into the alsa stuff, so a seperate sound server is no longer needed.
I'm hoping someone will correct me, but I think the current plan is to wait for alsa to improve, then dump arts and esd. I don't know whether alsa has any capability of remotely sending and recieving sound, I doubt it tho. This could be solved by having a sound proxy, or perhaps by making the audio output device one of those network devices, (I forget what they are called - you dump text to the device, and it appears on the remote host, to be used as an input)

Re:Why not make a 'sound pipe'?

[Anonymous Coward]

Macs are used a ton be creative proffesionals, their low audio latency is a huge factor in this. They have very low latency, especially considering the wintel worlds mhz and ddr.

Re:Why not make a 'sound pipe'?

[_Spirit]

On a related note, a friend of mine used to have a linux server in his room. As the cdplayer in it wasn't doing anything in particular on the linux side he hooked it up to provide him with music 24 hrs a day. He enjoyed that very much, until one day he decided i knew my around linux well enough and gave me (remote) access to his machine. My room was only a cpl of doors away and I can tell you The Prodigy sounds really funny when someone writes a shell script to access your cd drive every cpl of seconds ;-) (this was in the days of 4x speed cd drives)

Cool hacks

[snolan]

Nifty cool and neato keen.

What other cool hacks are there on OS X?

I have fond memories of xcalc -analog in AIX (IBM) systems from the AIX 3.1.5 days, it brought up a extremely usable X11 slide rule.

I also got a kick out of the SGI Irix Audio Panel, from the command line you could type apanel -spinaltap and the volume meters on the Audio Panel would go to 11 instead of merely 10.

Dude ...

[Kiaser Zohsay]

Will it play the Ellen Feiss "Switcher" ad? That would be so bitchin...

Re:Dude ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah. Plays it awesome =). Just remember to put the phone size down to 9 or lower and use Courier. Looks hilarious

Screenshot

[daeley]

There's a link in this entry for a screenshot if you're interested in what it looks like.

Invert

[Englabenny]

I would sugggest that you look at the source code (beacause that's what it is really, code to example features) and modify the code to invert the charset, which leaves spaces where it's white, thus playing nicely, with right brightness on white terms.

aaxine

[JimR]

So us non-Maccies don't feel left out, us Linux users can use aaxine (part of the excellent xine project).

.

I'm the chosen one!

[dhardman]

Having my font color green, and the background black, the first thing I thought of was the last scene of The Matrix. Even though this has been out a while, It's fun to play with.

In color

[extra88]

From the comments on the MacOSXHints article.

ASCIIMoviePlayer in color

Also, ASCIIMoviePlayer can play/show anything Quicktime can, including many graphics file formats and Flash.

BTW, if you run it over a remote ssh connection, the sound should not come out at the console since it's a separate session.

because....

[commodoresloat]

It's really funny to annoy your employer by having the sound from "The Matrix" suddenly come blaring out of his computer.

allready posted

[(startx)]

I thought I'd seen this before. It was discussed in a comment thread about the quicktime 6.0.2 release notes.

http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=43094& ci d=4515630

I submitted this in June.

[ZigMonty]

2002-06-16 12:59:03 ASCIIMoviePlayer (apple,osx) (rejected)

*sigh*

Re:I submitted this in June.

[Kr3m3Puff]

Frustrating isn't it. I really think that the editors need to have meta-moderation of their posting habits. We have dupes of articles in the same day (or I even saw a dupe in Slashback last night). I posted an article and was rejected to only have the next day a very similiar article (with less links) posted.

Selected individuals should moderate incoming articles and once it hits a certain threshold, then it should be put in an editors queue for consideration of posting.