This reminds me of libcaca [1], which anyone interested in this should check out. It's integrated in various tools, including ffmpeg, mpv, and of course VLC (Sam Hocevar, who wrote libcaca, was also a key VLC contributor at its beginnings).
The biggest difference I see (apart from the used programing language) is that libcaca outputs colored ascii art.
I was just about to say. With mpv, you can play videos as ASCII art just by doing mpv --vo=caca <file>. Just make sure your mpv is actually built with caca support (mpv --vo=help; Arch Linux's mpv is not, Fedora's is).
There's a version of "Never Gonna Give You Up" in ASCII art. Which means if you can access a .bashrc or something similar, you can rick roll them in their terminal on startup.
Is there anything like this where it's only coloring the text and not the background of the font? Hoping to find something like ascii-gen [0,1] but for video
Happy to hear it! That's a great suggestion -- I will add that feature. Probably a button that you can press in the GUI, which will then populate a text field at the bottom with the relevant chars / line breaks of that frame.
Thank you! It was fun making this. I think I'll try some other video manipulations now that I've got code for splitting videos into frames / reading pixel data from each frame.
Maybe start to head into the direction of filters. Stuff that after effects can already do for video. Stay interested in this and keep improving. Great work.
I thought the point of ASCII art was that it could be exported into Notepad. is the website mainly for aesthetics/art as opposed to inserting diagrams into READMEs now?
Yes this website is mainly for aesthetics and art. I will however add a feature that will generate the relevant chars / line breaks of a given still image, so that it can be exported to notepad.
The biggest difference I see (apart from the used programing language) is that libcaca outputs colored ascii art.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libcaca
Found it: https://github.com/keroserene/rickrollrc
[0] https://github.com/seatedro/asciigen [1] https://x.com/seatedro/status/1828414268707946506
Then change the font colors as you wish.
I don't think that's ever been the point of ASCII art. It's just art made with ASCII characters, that's it.
This makes it easy to create video ascii art from any computer or phone