Video Ascii - ASCII Art

Introduction

ASCII stands for "American Standard Code for Information Interchange" it is one of the the most widely used examples of usable character standards currently in use. You probably don't even realise it but if you are using a computer to read this, then you are most likely using ASCII to access and read this very article. It is widely used as common printable characters a-z, A-Z and 0-9 along with the various punctuation marks and readily found on your screen and keyboard. Video Ascii is a form of Ascii Art this is the depiction of a readily distinguishable object, person or form that uses the tonal qualities within individual characters to display a recognisable picture. This type of art first came about with the early typewriter and with individual keyboard characters painstakingly manipulated to depict a person or object. This process was only made slightly quicker with the introduction of the electric typewriter, but not much. As computers came into the scene display outputs were extremely simple, both video and print but the production of Ascii Art was almost automated and much simplified. Now it is possible to produce video Ascii Art using common tools readily available from within standard Ubuntu repositories.

ASCII code Table

Video Ascii Art - "hasciicam"

The simplest way to display a moving image using Ascii is to download "hasciicam" unfortunately if you like me have an Acer Aspire One with a Webcam installed "hasciicam" correctly identifies the webcam in the unit but refuses to work, so if you have a fix for this please let me know. Open a new terminal and type the following.

#> sudo apt-get update
#> sudo apt-get upgrade
#> sudo apt-get install hasciicam

This will install "hasciicam" which you can then run from the command line.

#> hasciicam

The output if it works will go directly to the screen as a cascade of changing ASCII characters that as objects within your video move this will be replicated to your screen only using shade of ASCII.

Now if Hasciicam does not work then don't dismay there is another way to produce the same or similar output it's just a bit more involved at not at all well documented. Or alternatively you can find a webcam that works with this program.

Colour Video Ascii Art - "vlc"

#> sudo apt-get update
#> sudo apt-get upgrade
#> sudo apt-get install vlc v4l

This will install "vlc" which you can then run from the command line however we will use the variant especially for the command line called "cvlc".

#> cvlc --vout caca v4l2:///dev/video0

Where "video0" is your installed webcam device. This generates a colourful ascii video art output which fills your screen. So lets look a little more closely at the command line string we have used above.

cvlc - is the command line version of vlc both commands can be substituted with one another --vout - selects the video output module

caca - is a plugin that converts the video to ascii art in colour

v4l2:// - is the device URL so to speak and allows us to select the source input video

It should be possible to use other plugins also in a similar manner to view a full list on your system you can use the following command.

#> vlc --list

Wow what a list vlc is awsome.

Ascii art also extends to the command line also, tools are available such as "figlet" and on Ubuntu "linuxlogo" these fall outside the scope of the above tutorial but worthy a mention at least.

You can install these in Ubuntu using the package manager or apt-get, open a new terminal and add the following:

#> sudo apt-get install figlet linuxlogo

"Linuxlogo" may differ on the system you are using we have seen "linuxlogo" expressed as "linux_logo" and may appear graphically different on other systems in addition. it should also be possible to compose your own linuxlogo.