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Comment by bwy | Hacker News Reader

This is awesome! Wonder how it compares with mine (github.com/billyeh/termchat). Would love to share notes with the maker, since audio was something I did not even consider while I was making it. The image processing part is fun, though!

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I helped create it at a recent hackathon. the ascii is rendered by calculating the intensity of any given pixel, mapping that intensity to a character based on how much that character fills up space ('@' would be bright and '.' would be dark) and then approximating the color of the pixel to fit within the 256 available

I've noticed your implementation uses websockets, which are built on top of TCP. we used UDP and encapsulated everything is a pretty simple to use (and easily the most well documented part of the project) p2plib.c. the fear was that video and audio can get backed up if we were to use TCP. so audio and video were sent via UDP packets and rendered every time a UDP packet was recieved.

You can go a bit further to get significantly higher color depths using ASCII block characters 176, 177, 178. By using the foreground and background ANSI colors and blending them by using these three characters (25%, 50%, 75%) you can achieve some quite realistic images. If you're more interested in resolution, using half block characters like 220 and 223 can allow you to double your vertical resolution at the cost of not being able to use the color trick.

I made something similar to this using a combination of 256 color mode and unicode halftone characters for "dithering" between the foreground/background colors.

https://github.com/dhotson/txtcam

Another thing I'd like to try to get a bit more resolution is to perhaps use the braille character set in combination with 256 color mode: https://github.com/asciimoo/drawille

Also, some terminals are starting to support 24bit color (iTerm2 nightlies) which could pretty drastically improve the possibilities of terminal based video: https://github.com/frytaz/txtcam/tree/color :)

the blending sounds like a good idea, even without the blocks p2pvc makes no use of background color

I've tried doing this before but wasn't fully satisfied with my color lookup (very basic - really, even a hash table would do the way I made it..) https://github.com/minikomi/ansipix

Do you have any good examples of calculating the right foreground/background colors to use?

Also have a look at:

http://aa-project.sourceforge.net/aalib/

http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/libcaca

and possibly other clones too. Might help improve the visuals.

While I do find image processing fun too, why not just use libAA?

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