Spongebob-CLI – Watch classic spongebob from the terminal | Hacker News Reader

Spongebob-CLI – Watch classic spongebob from the terminal

github.com

94 pointsmaydemir31 comments

bit dissapointing that it doesn't actually render video into the terminal, just launches a video player

Adding "--vo=tct" after "mpv" in the argument list in line 55 of spongebob-cli should do the trick (haven't tested it myself).

https://github.com/trakBan/spongebob-cli/blob/main/spongebob...

edit: yep, works. You might also want to add "--quiet" to get rid of artifacts.

Linux n00b over here... apologies for the silly question but I can't seem to make this work

I enter spongebob-cli

Then when it prompts me to enter an episode number, I can't seem to get it to play from within the terminal itself

let's say I want to play episode 1:

1 --mpv --vo=tct --quiet

Doesn't seem to work. Any help to get past this would be greatly appreciated

Did you add them as separate strings like this?

  subprocess.run(["mpv", "--vo=tct", "--quiet", DirectLink])

Otherwise your terminal may be missing true-color terminal mode or the mpv in your distro doesn't have that output plugin. (You can check with "mpv --vo=help")

If, like me, you forget where to split the command and arguments, shlex.split in the standard library can split the raw string for you.

Rule of thumb is every space, except ones you'd normally put between quotes. so e.g.

    foo quix-quiz "bar baz"

turns into

    ["foo", "quix-quiz", "bar baz"]

Though do note that you don't get an extra set of quotes on "bar baz" which is slightly confusing, but makes sense once you think about it a bit.

You need to edit spongebob-cli to add the arguments to the code where it calls mpv. It sounds like you're just running it and providing the arguments to its prompt.

Honestly, a terminal based search/browse with media player video would be my ideal replacement for youtube and similar

look for projects that use youtube-dl

I do. I write my own scripts that use it too.

I remember watching the soccer world cup like that years ago, just connecting with netcat. It received the "video" 5 seconds earlier than my TV.

In ten years we'll be generating new SpongeBob cartoons from the terminal.

We can already replicate his voice:

https://fakeyou.com/tts/TM:jn4amf60mk58

TTS has lots of room for improvement, but the technology is already widely accessible and easy to deploy. We'll soon have voice conversion with dynamic control of tempo, pitch, timbre, etc.

We have GANs that can generate stills. (this{person,cat,waifu,furry,etc.}doesnotexist.com)

It won't be long before we can generate animated sequences, maintain temporal coherence, and correct for pose and posture.

Animation is going to be wild.

Anybody else working in this space? (Anybody want to be working in this space? Message me!)

MPV is the secret sauce: https://ubunlog.com/en/mpv-reproductor-video-terminal/

I'd argue megacartoons.net is the secret sauce as that's where it's fetching the video to put into mpv.

I had a quick look at the code to see how it worked and I feel like I'm being daft; where is line 28 getting the variable `soup` from?

https://github.com/trakBan/spongebob-cli/blob/eac7eded094a48...

It's introduced into the global scope on line 82. Too me this seems a bit obfuscated.

Ah good spot, thanks! I'd agree with you there...

https://github.com/trakBan/spongebob-cli/blob/eac7eded094a48...

That's a local variable

First and second season, great. Third season, good and bad. After that, poo. And how many seasons is it? 10?

The original creator (Stephen Hillenburg) left after the third season. As I understand it, he wanted to end the series there, but of course Nickelodeon couldn't resist milking the cash cow.

The first spongebob movie was supposed to be the finale, which was released after the three seasons.

As cool as this is; I’m a bit surprised that this is trending here with its questionable legality.

I get that it’s not hosting any illegal material, but it’s linking to it, so it’s still pretty sketch.

Neat tool, though…

I'm not surprised. Hackers tend to gravitate towards "interesting" or "curious" things no matter the legal status. Sci-Hub, ThePirateBay or Swartz downloading documents from JSTOR are all interesting subjects which most hackers would find interesting enough to upvote if it shows up here. If the whole "Encryption is munition" thing would have happened when HN existed, I would have expected that to circulate the frontpage weekly, if not daily.

> If the whole "Encryption is munition" thing

This never went away, now they're saying encryption is only used by drug traffickers and pedophiles.

Sigh, I was mentored briefly by the lawyer who represented Zimmerman in that case. Was surprised he got away from the crypto space, but I'm sure he was burnt out.

Awesome tool but what is the legality of this? Where is it sourcing the episodes from?

> Awesome tool but what is the legality of this?

It's a client, none of the copyrighted work is stored in the software, it merely facilitates the user to load it in a media player.

> Where is it sourcing the episodes from?

The answer is in the source: https://github.com/trakBan/spongebob-cli/blob/eac7eded094a48...

TLDR: seems to be fetched from a source called "megacartoons".

Thanks

I don’t think that necessarily makes it legal - they might be liable for "contributory copyright infringement”, which occurs if you deliberately and knowingly link to copyrighted materials and encourage/enable others to infringe.

See http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/04-480.ZO.html

(Eg torrent sites are also illegal in many countries despite merely linking to copyrighted materials)

Not sure why you link to some website talking about some US court's decision, the author of the spongebob-cli obviously doesn't live in the US.

To be honest I didn't see where the author was and wanted to provide a detailed example (I'm in the UK, but could post similar case results here, but this site has lots of US readers so thought that would clarify the legality for most people)

The main reason for the post is that your original post which implied that just because it didn't host the copyrighted content itself made it OK from a legal perspective - this is probably untrue.

One similar ruling for the ECJ is below, which again demonstrates that this would likely be illegal in Croatia:

https://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2016/06/article_0007.h...

As a further note, not only is the application itself probably illegal to develop / release, it is almost certainly illegal to use. It's unlikely to be the subject of enforcement action though for the users (Although I would be surprised if Viacom was cool with this).

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