Watch Movies in ASCII

The first thing you’ll want to do is make sure that mplayer is installed, which is easy enough from the command line:

Then, to actually watch the movies from a terminal window, use the following syntax, replacing MovieName with the filename of your video.

The “caca” command is actually the color text driver – you could also use ” -vo aa ” instead for black & white, but that would just be silly.

These screenshots don’t really do it justice – it’s seriously just as bad when you’re watching.

   

Sequences with a lot of contrast work better…

And it wouldn’t help to sit about 8 feet back from the monitor.

Now that was truly a Stupid Geek Trick!