Lawand's Blog

I saw something catchy the other day, and I thought I would share it.

ASCII Art

For those who doesn’t know it, ASCII Art is about using the standard ASCII characters to resemble images or pictures, and it was -at the beginning- used by owners of printers that lacked graphics ability, so they had to use characters in place of graphic marks.^[1]
But then, for it’s style or ease of implementation across a wide range of platforms (Basically plain text support is the only requirement), ASCII Art got the attention of (hackers and/or computer geeks) such as me :D

ASCI Art Examples

The last one “High ASCII” style is usually found in the .nfo files that are included in Warez software packages, smilies such as “:)” are also considered ASCII Art…

ASCII Art + VLC = ??

Now for our topic today, I found that the Multi-platform Open Source VLC media player has a plug-in that plays ordinary video files as ASCII Art!^[2]
Thus the final result will be something like this:

Original image (or video frame)

Resulting image (after processing)

So, go ahead and try it out!

The steps to accomplish that are:

1. Download VLC media player (the required plug-in is included).
2. Run VLC media player using the following command line arguments:
   

   vlc --vout caca somevideo.avi

Whereas: somevideo.avi is the target file with the full path (the file name and path shouldn’t include spaces) and vlc is the location of the VLC media player executable file, typically “C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe” (in Microsoft Windows).

Extras

I found an article describing how to use another media player (mplayer) to Watch Videos in ASCII Art, check it out here

References

1. ASCII Art (Wikipedia)
2. Uncommon uses (VideoLAN Wiki)

Revision History