Asciline – real-time ASCII video rendering engine | Hacker News Reader

Asciline – real-time ASCII video rendering engine

github.com

67 pointsgodot25 comments

It’s not cross-platform if the platform is the browser… Lot of vibed nonsense in the README in general.

They are certainly playing loose with the truth: README says "Standard codecs (H.264/VP9) require dedicated hardware decoders"

It's unclear to me why I'd want to use this over libcaca or similar? The demoscene has made really excellent ASCII rendering for decades, and this seems like it has less options and less understandable output. If this is just a fun personal project "just because" then cool! That's awesome! But for actual use cases I'd much rather use libcaca.

So, an aalib/libcaca, but vibe-coded?

What's the deal with all these projects spiking thousands of stars in a few days? I find it hard to believe people are just flocking to random obscure niche projects and starring them instead of just... vibe coding their own projects.

I guess either buying stars, or one or the other video from a TikTok AI attention farmer.

I feel like this is only technically ASCII rendering. As far as I can tell, it's always the same chars that are rendered, and only colouring tags change.

That seems to optimise for usability/complexity ratio, while completely throwing coolness under the bus. But this is a ASCII video generator, I would've thought coolness was the point? I can't imagine a practical usecase for it...

Video in the terminal window of course

npm install will continue after a short break from our sponsor

The "practical" use case is to allow auto playing of videos for those users who disable it, from the "Strategic Vision & Core Capabilities" section:

> Bypassing Browser Constraints: Modern browsers aggressively throttle autoplay videos, and ad-blockers restrict traditional media frames. To the browser, ASCILINE is simply "JavaScript updating a canvas"—completely invisible to media restrictions.

I guess I might finally be convinced to disable JavaScript in my browser

While this is presented as a way to evade ad blockers, using it to serve ads is explicily prohibited in the license:

The permission granted by this license explicitly EXCLUDES the right to use this software, in whole or in part, for the purpose of serving, delivering, or displaying digital advertisements, sponsored content, or any form of commercial marketing to end-users. Any such use immediately terminates this license.

All this means in practice is that anyone who wants to use it for ads needs to get in touch with the devs and negotiate another set of licensing terms and an amount...

Seems like the README is heavily vibed, as it seems to not even understand what the repo does:

> Local AI & LLM Ready: By reducing complex pixel streams into structured logical strings, ASCILINE acts as a perfect bridge for AI. Instead of feeding heavy computer vision models, lightweight LLMs can process semantic video summaries.

In what way is this semantic/structured?

So... just render the video to a canvas? What does ASCII have to do with it

There's this one guy doing crazy stuff with ASCII rendering, I can't remember his name/handle/project though :(

Peter Brittain? https://asciinema.org/~peterbrittain

I think different guy but this is really cool too :)

Why the heck you want put video into a html canvas as text?

Yeah, asking the same question.

The biggest problem I see is that web browsers don't natively support .ans inside <canvas> without Ansilove.js or Xterm.js hacks.

Having a native AV format that comes from ANSI, pre-rendered via FFmpeg, is the missing link for <video> support.

This would be nice as a video-conferencing tool. All your nerdy friends in a tmux window.

Im working on this and posted here but nobody cared or it got removed.

https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/tcom

This is sexy, and interesting. Following! "Encrypted voice, video, and chat over Tor -- entirely from the terminal." and it has Push to Talk. It is cool.

Funny to see the avatar on the GitLab project https://gitlab.com/uploads/-/system/user/avatar/32369523/ava... ASCII-person :-D

Just 2 files .. that is nice .. https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/tcom/-/tree/main .. it's pretty readable too.

FYI: I ran and installed deps (excluding numpy) and then performed the audio/video loopback test, and that worked - perfectly nice :) (might want to zoom on my face automagically, for facial-cues, as my resolution was low). While running in iTerm2 on macos the main menu, after this, it complained about blocking scrollback-history clearing attempts, and then became unwilling to show typed digits - only for the deps + loopback test phases was it willing to show them. ENTER was processed, and the menu rightly said "invalid choice". Still, good work! Here's a video:

https://youtu.be/EqMZ5k2KlBI

Cheers!

Wow thankyou for the feedback!

I am working on that exact fix for the options entry something is hanging in the loop entering inputs.

There are a few bugs to work out and polishing that needs to take place on the menu side.

I plan to make all the functionality of terminalcam compatible within tcom, currently it's defaulting to the max compression settings so the preview isn't exactly matching what is sent whuch is bothering me. You'll notice runing the standalone terminalcam.py provides a lot more configurability if it runs on its own.

I was able to trigger the macos follow face / remove background features before it gets preprocessed on terminalcam. I'm not sure what if every macos flavor has this.

Loved the video, so awesome.

lost me at the github stars chart, but "Bypassing Browser Constraints" is great. that's just what users want /s

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