Play a video in ASCII colour text format using Mplayer

Written on December 19th, 2010 at 21:26 pm by shredder12

Mplayer is a marvellous media player. Not just the fact that it can play almost all audio/video formats, it even provides you with a powerful command line. You can handle every feature of Mplayer through the terminal. Just to give you a taste of its awesomeness, here is a small trick to play video in a terminal using ASCII characters(in colour) through Mplayer.

Enter this command in a terminal

[shredder12]$ mplayer -vo caca video.ext

A new terminal window will open and you will see the video being displayed using ascii characters.

-vo This option is used to provide the video output driver.

caca It's a video output driver - colour ASCII art video output, works on text console.

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