Show HN: Termplay: Play videos in your terminal

I see these every so often, but they never mention Sixels, which could be used to display videos with much more detail (like with https://github.com/saitoha/FFmpeg-SIXEL ).

Sixels aren't widely supported, and the implementations I tried were lacking in stability, but they offer some interesting possibilities, like embedding images into your text browser (and not with a hack like w3m uses), or playing Battle for Wesnoth inside your terminal [ https://github.com/saitoha/libsixel ]

Mplayer can do this by default e.g.

    $ CACA_DRIVER=ncurses mplayer -quiet -vo caca video.avi

Here's the Silicon Valley intro in glorious ASCII: http://i.imgur.com/YKP6nfP.png

I had some audio sync issues with mplayer, and it sounds like termplay avoids that. I'm also not sure if there's a way to use true colour with mplayer.

You should allow the user to specify a pixel ratio that describes the width/height of each character of their terminal font. Otherwise, your images will be distorted, because your output pixels are not square.

Here's a screenshot demonstrating this issue, when converting a GIF to text in a terminal:

https://monosnap.com/file/HwrGbSHEwxWlTQCCeXyd9qcFxwL38V.png

On the left, the original image. In the center, a ratio-perserved resized render in a terminal On the left, a pixel-ratio aware resized render.

Great! Now can we get this integrated with Lynx so that can be my default browser?

I've written something similar myself in C++ before, but I'm curious if people actually have interest in using something like this regularly. I had thought I would do something like configure lynx to use it but the novelty quickly wore off and instead I went and started playing with the Mandelbrot set in the terminal and forgot all about it.

It's 2017 and we still don't have a single decent bitmap terminal.

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