ascii-rs

A Rust command line tool that plays videos as coloured ASCII art directly in your terminal with minimal performance overhead.

Screenshots

And everyone's favourite:

Pre-requisites

• CPU with decent performance
• FFmpeg (must be on your system PATH)
• Any modern terminal emulator that supports Unicode and ANSI escape codes

Usage

• Download the latest stable release from releases.
• Alternatively, get the nightly build from GitHub Actions.
• Run in your terminal:

  ./ascii-rs <path-to-video> # play the video
  ./ascii-rs <path-to-video> --compat # for terminals with limited color support
  ./ascii-rs <path-to-video> --regenerate # force rebuild the ASCII cache

Build from source

• If not already, install Rust via rustup and FFmpeg (must be on your system PATH).
• Clone this repository and navigate to the root directory.
• From the project root, run in your terminal:
  • Debug: cargo build
  • Release: cargo build --release

Notes

• Larger terminals look better; a minimum of 30 columns x 20 rows is recommended.
• Tested on Windows Terminal (Powershell): Achieved ~30fps with 305 columns x 109 rows (from a 1080p/30fps video) running on a 3.6GHz CPU.
• A cache file is created to speed up subsequent runs of the same video.

Dependencies

Check Cargo.toml for a full list of dependencies.