BeigeJournal

Naturally, I use MPlayer to play video files on my Linux systems. MPlayer is open source under the GPL and can handle just about any file you can throw at it. It also supports a great variety of output devices, including not only plain and fancy X11 support but also a vast array of special hacks to get better performance for video while cooperating with X11, various non-X11 modes, and some oddities.

One of the oddities, which I discovered while looking through the documentation, is text-mode ASCII-art. Naturally, I thought that this was a joke. No one would actually implement such a thing, right? Well, some folks with spare-time issues have written the AA-lib ASCII-Art library to turn bitmaps into ASCII-art, and, indeed, another person with excess spare time interfaced AA-lib with MPlayer, so, yes, there really is an ASCII-art output mode for MPlayer, so you can watch your movies in text mode. It really works, and it is just the most bizarrely amazing thing I’ve seen in a while. Just download the AA-lib, do the usual configure, make, make install, and then rebuild MPlayer. The MPlayer configure script will automagically detect AA-lib. Find a video that will look good as ASCII-art (the 1948 Lucky Strikes square-dancing cigarettes commercial from the Prelinger Archives, for example), try mplayer -vo aa filename, and prepare to be amazed.