ASCII Art, flashing.

January 18, 2010 4:10 PM

ASCIImeo, Videos in text.
posted by Substrata (27 comments total)

Cool stuff. Thanks.
posted by sswiller at 4:23 PM on January 18, 2010

The developer's website has a few more details:

The player is an evolution of earlier video experiments I was doing in Alchemy. Still using Jari Komppa’s TextFX7 engine for the glyph conversion and AS3ANSI for the rendering, this version features improved speeds and a control UI including fullscreen mode.

posted by hippybear at 4:24 PM on January 18, 2010

Oh my gosh it's like the finest BBS loading screens ever created.
posted by cavalier at 4:26 PM on January 18, 2010 [4 favorites]

No search term I've tried returns any results...

The sample videos you linked to aren't *bad* or anything but I used mplayer to play videos in ascii mode probably about a decade ago so it doesn't seem like a surprise or revelation to me.

OK the search is working again. For like 10 minutes it gave me 0 results for everything.
posted by RustyBrooks at 4:26 PM on January 18, 2010 [1 favorite]

Hmm and now I'm getting 0 results again.
posted by RustyBrooks at 4:27 PM on January 18, 2010

Oh- at first I thought this was just a couple of videos, but then I realized it'll do any vimeo videos, if you just take the vimeo ID and append it to asciimeo.com. The flash player on this site somehow real-time ASCII-izes the video stream coming from Vimeo (with Vimeo's approval, since I assume it couldn't stream the Vimeo video cross-domain without their explicitly allowing it).

It didn't work for me in FF, but it did in IE. But this is very cool... now if I can just get it to play adult videos, it'll be completing the circle (jerk) back to the old ASCII porn days of my BBS-laden youth...
posted by hincandenza at 4:29 PM on January 18, 2010 [1 favorite]

RustyBrooks: it could be the MetaFilter traffic is overwhelming the server right now...
posted by hippybear at 4:29 PM on January 18, 2010

Reminded me of this oldie but goodie:

http://webpages.mr.net/bobz/ttyquake/
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 4:33 PM on January 18, 2010

This is freaking awesome. Never seen anything quite like this, and I love it - thanks for posting it.

The first time I got an error upon attempting to play a video, but it worked on the second try. High traffic, perhaps. Is it actually doing on-the-fly server-side translation of videos into...whatever you call this? If so, no wonder it's getting overwhelmed.
posted by Salvor Hardin at 4:33 PM on January 18, 2010

Yeah, I too was expecting more than the same-old ASCII video I've been seeing for years. The only hard part of this project would be getting a video stream from vimeo.
posted by DU at 4:37 PM on January 18, 2010

Is it actually doing on-the-fly server-side translation of videos into...whatever you call this?

Yes, it is. See my earlier link.
posted by hippybear at 4:43 PM on January 18, 2010

This one turns out pretty good.
posted by burnmp3s at 4:57 PM on January 18, 2010 [1 favorite]

That's pretty cool, but I wonder why they limited the colors. They could have used true color, for example, it would have been cooler.
posted by delmoi at 5:04 PM on January 18, 2010

It looked to me like they were using only the colors available from the early days of color ASCII computers. I could be wrong about that, but there was something distinctly C64 about that.
posted by hippybear at 5:16 PM on January 18, 2010

Salvador Hardin:
Is it actually doing on-the-fly server-side translation of videos into...whatever you call this?

It loads the video on the front-end with flash, then uses Adobe's new feature Alchemy, which enables flash to interface with a C based program that does a lot of the calculations and then returns the results to flash to be rendered to screen in real time. All on the client's machine. Not too bad-
posted by localhuman at 6:04 PM on January 18, 2010

Amazing.
posted by cjorgensen at 6:07 PM on January 18, 2010

if you want to create something like this yourself, there is a program called Processing, (basically allows really easy creation of small applets and assorted java creating fun[without needing knowledge of programming]), it has an "example" set of code which turns the video feed of a web-cam into Ascii-dio

except, on reading, this is much cooler, as it involves web-wizardry, considering what Hippybear pointed to... and on looking, this one (BOARDS OF CANADA, NICE) uses processing specifically...
posted by infinite intimation at 6:38 PM on January 18, 2010

The 3rd & The 7th
posted by empath at 7:43 PM on January 18, 2010

I must say that the original, un-ASCII-fied video, from infinite intimation, is quite enjoyable.
posted by localhuman at 8:18 PM on January 18, 2010 [1 favorite]

yeah you can totally do this with mplayer but it's nice to not have to rip the mp4 from vimeo and then fuck about on the command line
posted by tehloki at 8:34 PM on January 18, 2010

Glad I'm not the only person still using ASCII.
posted by kindalike at 10:24 PM on January 18, 2010

Now he's just got to downsample all the audio to 8-bit and this will be awesome.
posted by azarbayejani at 10:34 PM on January 18, 2010

This works really well with my favorite vimeo video.
posted by azarbayejani at 10:37 PM on January 18, 2010

This works really well with my favorite vimeo video.

Well, if we're going to link to our favorite vimeo videos then I'm going to have to link to Kings of Power 4 BILLION % which actually worked better in this then I expected

(but see it on vimeo first, if you havn't seen it already)
posted by delmoi at 5:36 AM on January 19, 2010

This is what Neo sees all the time.
posted by Burhanistan at 6:51 AM on January 19, 2010 [1 favorite]

VLC has an ASCII video output module too.
posted by quoquo at 7:17 AM on January 19, 2010

I have found the video this was intended for.
posted by The Winsome Parker Lewis at 8:44 AM on January 19, 2010