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ASCII QuickTime Movie Player

Posted by pudge on from the tasty-ascii-goodness dept.

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 ...

23 of 36 comments (clear)

  1. Funnies in the source code by aster_ken · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    1. Re:Funnies in the source code by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      /* 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
      */

  2. Make the font size tiny by IRNI · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  3. Also doable with mplayer by palfrey · · Score: 5, Informative

    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)

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    Beware the psychokinetic mimes!
    1. Re:Also doable with mplayer by 0x0d0a · · Score: 2

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

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    2. Re:Also doable with mplayer by Valdrax · · Score: 2

      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.

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  4. Of course . . . by cjpez · · Score: 2

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

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    Al Qaeda has ninjas!
  5. already been done by spatula · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  6. sourceforge project by hayne · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:sourceforge project by RevAaron · · Score: 2

      :( I get a bus error on 10.1.

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      Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
    2. Re:sourceforge project by goon+america · · Score: 2
      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.

  7. Why not make a 'sound pipe'? by Stonehead · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Why not make a 'sound pipe'? by JohnFluxx · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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)

    2. Re:Why not make a 'sound pipe'? by _Spirit · · Score: 2

      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)

      --

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  8. Dude ... by Kiaser+Zohsay · · Score: 3, Funny

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

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  9. Screenshot by daeley · · Score: 4, Informative

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

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    I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
  10. Invert by Englabenny · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  11. aaxine by JimR · · Score: 2

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

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    #exclude <ms/windows.h>
  12. I'm the chosen one! by dhardman · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

  13. Re:Question by jweatherley · · Score: 2

    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

    --

    --
    Reverse outsourcing: it's the future
  14. In color by extra88 · · Score: 4, Informative
    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.

  15. because.... by commodoresloat · · Score: 2

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

  16. allready posted by (startx) · · Score: 2

    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