Text-Based YouTube Video Player for Linux

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Working on a command line Linux system and want to watch a YouTube video? Until now you were out of luck. Warren Harding has designed a program that reads in a YouTube video and plays it using ASCII text!

“This is a concept video depicting how users can surf and even watch videos from youtube with out the use of a Graphical User Interface.
The operating System is linux fedora 6, I used the lynx text based browser to search for a video on youtube, then I dug through the source found the keys required to build a request to download the desired video. Once downloaded I invoked the shell from lynx to launch mplayer to play the downloaded video. Mplayer is a really handy media player utility, if it doesn’t see X it uses a text engine to render the video, it has support for every codec you could think of including flv.”

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44 Comments


  1. 1 question. could I get something like this for windows?
    that woul be cool. you know. watching a video and then watching it in ASCII.


  2. I would just like to add that this was not some thing I created, I used linux, lynx and Mplayer, and the text engine is AA-Lib, all great projects kudos to them.


  3. What a waste of time! He could have just shown the video playing. What numbnuts types in a URL that long? There is such a thing as GPM. Doh!

    That is the AAlib library and Mplayer has been linked to it for an age.

    http://www.oreilly.com/pub/h/4441

    If your mplayer has been linked to aalib properly and aalib is installed just
    mplayer -vo aa myspiffyvideoina.formatmplayerlikes

    Tada!

    I think there is an Mplayer for vindos but do not know if aalib can be compiled for it.

    Yes I have played DooM and Quake using that. No it wasn’t very fun but it is fun running AA stuff in text mode.

    Most distros have aalib installed, try aafire in a terminal

    Now
    Get all your dev tools installed and compile this.
    It’s much cooler that flash pr0n
    http://aa-project.sourceforge.net/bb/


  4. “… has designed a program …”
    There is no special program, at least not shown in this video. Just two standard programs and some searching and manual url copying.

    To make it practical, you should have some script, plugin or patch for lynx to automate this.
    The second part, launching mplayer, might be fairly easy. Lynx already offers an option to view it with the external program less (a text viewer with some fancy options to view (information about) other files too). Adding another external program based on the mimetype of the file shouldn’t be too hard.

    The first part, the extracting of the proper url to get the flv file, is probably very difficult to integrate into lynx.
    A site like http://videodownloader.net (/get/?url=…) could be used to convert the youtube webpage url to the url of the actual flv file.

    If you want ascii video on windows, there is a version of mplayer for windows. You could install that and see if it has ascii output support.
    From a console run: mplayer -vo help
    Then it should list it’s output drivers, if (among other things) it says:
    “aa AAlib” or “caca libcaca”
    you can do: mplayer -vo aa [videofile] to get the output seen in this video. Or with -vo caca you can even get colored ascii output, but the colors look very funky.


  5. Well … mplayer also supports graphical mode under console mode, Geexbox [ http://geexbox.org/ ] is a media center using mplayer … without X, very light on resources 🙂


  6. Anyone with linux can play a demo based on aalib typing “bb” in the console (you must have the bb package installed). This demo shows you all you can do with aalib.


  7. Henkie in case you miss the first post :
    I would just like to add that this was not some thing I created, I used linux, lynx and Mplayer, and the text engine is AA-Lib, all great projects kudos to them.

    Mmeval its not p0rn, its a music video, its also a concept http://www.answers.com/concept, so some aspects may not appear to be practical “Doh!”, mice not allowed in the concept 🙂 .





  12. The idea and work isn’t something new, I don’t see what’s so “inventive” about this? video to ascii has been around for years. waste of time.



  14. This is great and all but was there a reason I waited 4 friggin minutes to watch you type in a long url and download the video? Ever heard of non-linear editing?


  15. This is without a doubt, the lamest thing I’ve ever clicked through on.

    I should be shot and forced to watch screens full of dancing hamsters.



  17. Hi Wendell,

    Sure you can share this on your blog. Same goes with anything on Hacked Gadgets.


  18. If you used libcaca instead of aalib, you’d even get colors! Just put “-vo caca” in between “mplayer” and the file name.


  20. Completely useless, but that’s why it’s so awesome.

    @cantormath
    sound is possible, but I think it would take up more resources and it wouldn’t sync up with the video.


  21. Incredibly incredibly bad. If there was a script it wouldn’t be so darn noob as it is but SERIOUSLY .. THIS!? Failure.


  22. aaxine will already do this…



  24. VLC Media Player for Windows (personally, I highly recommend it) has ‘color ASCII art’ as a video output module, built-in.

    Also, if you’re running Firefox, try “about:kitchensink” (in the address bar).


  25. like a piece of cake!

    I thought you implemented the ascii-out-mplayer into lynx, so you have ’embedded ascii-art-video’ but you only download the video and play it back with mplayer…

    Why don’t you use ‘gpm’ for cut’n’pasting the address? Would look muchmore sophisticated:-)



  27. make a version that doesn’t suck ass


  28. Cool, but I don’t see much point in doing this.



  30. Damn! Dont have colors!
    lmao

    Guy! Nice work, that’s the most weird thing I ever see!



  32. How did he view the source of the page to get the YouTube video? I’ve tried this in lynx. I can open a page and get to a video, but I can’t seem to get the link to the video to DL it.

    A summary, list of steps or voice over would help. Otherwise, pretty cool.


  33. You can use the mouse and Cut and Paste in text mode you know…



  35. Quite funny to see someone that use Linux to be a rebelian, and at the same time have a dell monitor. LOLS



  37. Someone spends too much time in the server room.





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