Stupid Geek Tricks: Watch Movies in Your Linux Terminal Window
In these days of high definition videos everywhere (even YouTube), only the truly geeky would decide to watch their movies in ASCII text in a terminal window. The surprising thing is that some videos are even fairly watchable.
I’ve found that cartoons work best because of the limited detail. Even more importantly, the series finale and (probably) last ever Futurama movie is coming out Tomorrow on DVD! You can pre-order Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder on Amazon.
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:
sudo apt-get install mplayer
Then, to actually watch the movies from a terminal window, use the following syntax, replacing MovieName with the filename of your video.
mplayer -vo caca MovieName.avi
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!
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They do look better if you squint your eyes whilst looking at them
Nice! My girlfriend’s prejudice against my geekiness will tenfold now, thank you!
Do you know what the “caca” command means in Spanish?
This is especially useful when working over the network with ssh. Also try cacaxine with a jpeg image, or check out the webcam with mplayer -tv device=/dev/video0:driver=v4l:width=640:height=480 tv:// -vo caca!
You could sit back 8 feet but if you have eyesight like a true geek just take the glasses off. I can watch comfortably like that.
Yea! Another shout-out for us linux users!
Seriously??
Why would you induce such eye screaming pain?
Yes!!!!!!! This is awesome, I can’t wait to try it out
Thank you Geek. I love the terminal, combined with movies now – oh man I feel so geeky.
Haha, yeah, “Caca” in spanish means “Sh****” hahaha…
I can think of one practical use – seeing movie over a slow network connection. Also, star wars.
Caca means shit in French too. We also say merde.
WHAT A GEEK way to watch movies… interessting.
Isn’t this ANSI text? ASCII doesn’t support colors.
That was created by Sam (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Hocevar). He initiated others projects which can be found there: http://caca.zoy.org/
Just enjoy the name
Its like watching scrambled pron on comcast!!
Nerdom at its finest! Congrats sir!!
you know you can do the same thing in vlc by
settings-preferences-videos-output modules
and selecting color ascii art video output.
advanced options required.
Windows users can do the same thing, using the VLC media player and choosing Preferences > Video Output > Color Ascii — from the menus.
Into the Wild Green Yonder is great, friend pre-ordered it and it arrived 2 days early. Good movie, kinda sad ending because it leaves it all open.
I’d still say it goes:
1) Beast with a Billion Backs
2) Into the Green Yonder
3) Bender’s Game
4) Bender’s Big Score
Hopefully they’ll pick it up again for a few more episodes.
@Sorry
No they can’t…not quite…because linux users can watch over an SSH connection. Windows users can only do it from the current machine, which kind of defeats the purpose of using ASCII…
You do know that you can use mplayer to play videos using svgalib in a terminal? It’s not great, but it’s better than ascii art.
Windows users can do the same thing, using the VLC media player and choosing Preferences > Video Output > Color Ascii — from the menus..
That is just what the doctor ordered, thanks! By the way … movies have much more details in black and white (if you don’t keep your glasses obviously lol)
Works to with mplayer in windows.
To change the resolution of the ASCII rendering, set the CACA_GEOMETRY environment variable, thusly:
CACA_GEOMETRY=160×120 mplayer -vo caca your_video_file.avi
Be forewarned, larger resolutions take pounds upon pounds of CPU to keep in sync with the video. Doubling the resolution quadruples the calculations
This is a pretty sweet geek trick. I was unable to get it to work over SSH, however. I was given an error initializing/opening the video output device. Blah.
@Steve, Windows users have also been able to watch star wars in the command terminal over telnet. I don’t suppose that is geek enough though, since it is Microsoft. Us Windows users will go cry in our corner, which is nicer than the Linux living room btw.
heheh. I love these ASCIIs
there are sooooooo many site out there allowing you to watch or download movies for free today. rrrau! this is just mental. linked to one of my favorites 
I watched The Matrix years ago using this method. I had to sit way back & squint, but it was an immersive experience
I watched The Matrix years ago using this method. I had to sit way back & squint, but it was an immersive experience
“Now that was truly a Stupid Geek Trick!” but awesome and shows the power of Linux
Nice. I like it!
Virtually indistinguishable from Dwarf Fortress!
Another reason to use linux over windows