A new way to watch frozen ....and any other youtube video

Bwahahaha!!

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That is really kewl! You could do a screen capture and create ASCII art with a laser !

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Done with this library. Scroll down a bit to see “Software known to support AA.”

http://aa-project.sourceforge.net/

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Wow. This takes those DOS pictures to a whole new level doesn’t it lol

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I remember about 15 years ago in the very early days of Mac OS X they had a tech demo for playing QuickTime movies as ASCII art in Terminal.app. I remember having fun watching movie trailers with it. :smiley:

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My favorite part is watching it try to render the subtitles as ASCII art. It’s like code… trying to render letters with the wrong letters.

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I remember feeding the old QuickTime ASCII art demo the first few minutes of Star Wars once. That was funny, watching it completely fail on the opening text.

I went looking for the source code for the old QuickTime ASCIIMoviePlayer sample code and was sad to see that Apple no longer distributes it. Of course, I kind of doubt it would even compile anymore on a modern system, given that it was written for Mac OS X 10.1 on 32-bit PowerPC.

But I did find an old mirror of it, so I’ll have to play around with it and see if I can get it working. (Step 1: Find something that can open StuffIt archives. LOL)

http://mirror.informatimago.com/next/developer.apple.com/samplecode/ASCIIMoviePlayerSample/ASCIIMoviePlayerSample.html

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I have an After Image plugin that does this. I definitely played with it for a long time when I first got it.

VLC does it. Your choice of B&W or color ascii. You can change the video output in settings or preferences or whatever they call it if you don’t like the command line.

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Gee… Now I can’t remember. Was it an AE plugin or was I using VLC?! I just remember it was really fun. But I couldn’t think of anything practical to do with it.

I’ve used VLC player for years(pc 1st then later mac) so figured I’d be able to find it easy(mac) but after searching through all the basic and advanced settings I can’t locate it.

Tools --> Preferences --> Video --> Output

You can choose ASCII from there.

I’ll have to boot up later when I get home from overnight. Pretty certain it isn’t there.
Also on Macs it’s:
Preferences -> (Advanced Mode) -> Video -> Tools
(I’m pretty sure. As I said, have to boot up after getting home. Church first)

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Preferences -> (Show All) -> Video -> X

Nothing nowhere.
Must have removed it at some point. Or it relies on something…

No apparently, the caca or aa libraries are by default, not enabled.
https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=39183

According to here, the codecs to convert started hitting conflicts with the X11 something or others in OSX so they dropped the caca codecs. So us Mac users would have to compile our own versions of VLC and then there’s no guarantee it would work.

Sorry to hear that! Somehow seems like a really weird thing to mess things up. What do I know, though?

I’m running Ubuntu and it came by default.