This player plays video on a terminal using ASCII characters and has an option to save the output as a text file that can be played back using play_ascii_video.sh. This allows you to play the video in restrictive environments or environments without Python. Requires curses. Cannot run on Windows.
There are 2 versions, one is plain python the other ones uses cython optimizations.
A good example are high contrast videos like bad apple, you can download it from youtube with youtube-dl from here
pip3 install -r requirements.txt
After having a file you can play it like this:
python3 player.py <video or video input device index>
The player uses 120 characters as default width. This can be changed using the --width flag. The height is calculated to preserve the aspect ratio.
The default framerate is 30 fps. This can also be changed using the --fps flag. If it's set too high it will just go as fast as it can.
You can choose to display the original video with opencv with --show true
You can also choose to invert the shades of the ascii video with --inv true
To use your webcam as video source simply specify the video input device index, most likely it is 0 unless you have multiple ones in which case you can just bruteforce your way through until you find it.
The regular python version is already pretty efficient even for larger screens, but cython can go even faster!
First make sure you have cython installed you can install it with pip3 install cython
Then compile the cython code: cython -3 painter.pyx. This will generate the painter.c file.
Now you can run the cplayer.py the same way as the other player.
You can try maxing out the framerate, in the end the average fps will be printed and you can see the difference there.