Aalib

[Darnell Rempe]

HelloI'm trying to watch a video in ASCII art using VLC. My intent is to use aalib through option -V aa, but I get those errors:

I manged to get ColoredASCII art (-V caca) working with the command:

AAlib is a library for displaying graphics in text mode, using powerfulASCII renderer. There are lots of programs alreadysupporting it, like Doom, Quake, etc. MPlayercontains a very usable driver for it. If ./configuredetects aalib installed, the aalib libvo driver will be built.

The rendering is very CPU intensive, especially when using AA-on-X(using aalib on X), and it's least CPU intensive on standard,non-framebuffer console. Use SVGATextMode to set up a big textmode,then enjoy! (secondary head Hercules cards rock :)) (but IMHO youcan use -vf 1bpp option to get graphics on hgafb:)

Playing on terminal you'll get better speed and quality using the Linuxdriver, not curses (-aadriver linux). But therefore youneed write access on/dev/vcsa!That isn't autodetected by aalib, but vo_aa tries to find the best mode.See -project.sf.net/tune for furthertuning issues.

I was helping out a friend working on a presentation where he wants to show some videos he has taken but converted to ASCII art. I can do that quite easily with mplayer on a Linux box using aalib (-vo aa). But that only plays the movie, transcoding it live. What I would like to do is to convert those videos to ASCII art and save them in files so that they can be played in a loop on some regular video players (be that vlc, wmediaplayer, whatever).

Then, start the video, maximize the window, wait until it stops, and stop the recording. Crop the screen dimensions and time of the screen capture video manually or with a script. The drawback here is that the work flow is greater than the real time of the video playback.

You have the most live playback options playing through mplayer so I would suggest setting up a Linux for your friend as the best option for playback. Also, you can loop the video by using the loop switch:

-loop 0

Just start your video player in xterm or any other terminal and capture this to mpgeg/avi/whatever video file using some screen recording tool. Two examples are in this post: How can I capture frames from X11 into a file?

Welcome back. Here we are, just past the halfway mark at day 13 of our 24 days of Linux command-line toys. If this is your first visit to the series, see the link to the previous article at the bottom of this one, and take a look back to learn what it's all about. In short, our command-line toys are anything that's a fun diversion at the terminal.

If you're in the northern hemisphere outside of the tropics, perhaps winter is starting to rear its frigid face outside. At least it is where I live. And some I'd love nothing more than to curl up by the fire with a cup of tea and my favorite book (or a digital equivalent).

On my system, I found aafire packed with aalib, a delightful library for converting visual images into the style of ASCII art and making it available at your terminal (or elsewhere). aalib enables all sorts of fun graphics at the Linux terminal, so we may revisit a toy or two that make use of it before the end of our series. On Fedora, this meant installation was as simple as:

Then, it was simple to launch with the aafire command. By default, aalib attempted to draw to my GUI, so I had to manually override it to keep my fire in the terminal (this is a command-line series, after all). Fortunately, it comes with a curses driver, so this meant I just had to run the following to get my fire going:

Do you have a favorite command-line toy that you think I ought to include? The calendar for this series is mostly filled out but I've got a few spots left. Let me know in the comments below, and I'll check it out. If there's space, I'll try to include it. If not, but I get some good submissions, I'll do a round-up of honorable mentions at the end.

Opensource.com aspires to publish all content under a Creative Commons license but may not be able to do so in all cases. You are responsible for ensuring that you have the necessary permission to reuse any work on this site. Red Hat and the Red Hat logo are trademarks of Red Hat, Inc., registered in the United States and other countries.

3a8082e126