How to play video INSIDE bash

Question

I want to play videos inside bash that displays a frame by characters. (Just Like ASCII Camera on Android) How do I do that?

Answer 1

If you have libcaca installed on your system you can do it with both mpv and mplayer:

mplayer -vo caca samle.avi

or

mpv --quiet -vo caca sample.avi

You could also use -vo aa for black & white output. You might need to prepend the command with DISPLAY= to trick caca to use terminal instead of regular window.

That is, if you media player was compiled with libcaca support. You can find out like so:

mpv --vo help

or

mplayer -vo help

Answer 2

If this is what you are referring to you can forget it. I haven't download that app but I'm pretty sure it doesn't even emulate a terminal. By the way your question is interesting.

Do this:

apt-get install sl

and then

sl

This is the maximum the terminal can do for you: a locomotive that moves. If you are OK with that we can move ahead.

Now install jp2a this way apt-get install jp2a You now can transform images to ASCII text by doing jp2a --width=150 myimagename.jpg

So at first your question looked impossible but now we can see that there might be a way out. There are other people who did that.

You now need to split a video into .jpg images and you can do that thanks to FFMPG this way . Becarefull, you might easily create more than 25,000 images out of a small video so tune the command...

[...]Change the %xd to however many digits you need, e.g. if the command would create more than 10,000 frames change the %04d to %05d. This also works for input files that are image sequence. Read more here.

Well, we are at a good point now:

• We can convert video to .jpg
• We can convert .jpg to ASCII text

You now need to write a script that does it automatically and then try to render the ASCII picture on the terminal like the sl locomotive and you are done