termplay

Name by the awesome @tbodt

Are you a terminal fanboy like me?
Sure, but do you ever watch YouTube? In your terminal?

termplay is the tool to convert images to ANSI sequences.
But it also supports playing videos... and YouTube...
Written in the systems language Rust, it has some solid performance.

Sixels, TrueColor and 256-bit color
- Sixels are slower, but has really good quality. Doesn't seem to work on higher resolutions though.
- TrueColor is any RGB color, so while the quality isn't great, the colors look fantastic!
- 256-bit color is the closest representation
- Choose whatever is supported by your terminal and sounds cool to you.
Flexible
- Change framerate, size and more using command line switches
Adapting size
- Automatically scales the image to fit your terminal

When playing a video:

Concurrency
- It's converting to ANSI while ffmpeg is still processing!
Audio/Frame Sync
- If one frame in takes longer to load and the audio continues on,
- don't just pretend nothing happened! Skip a few frames!
- Get back on track!

Or if you want to maintain ratio
(Landscape image from pexels.com)

Compatibility

This tool is tested in GNOME Terminal, Konsole and alacritty (glitchy but amazing framerate).
Might not be fully or supported at all by whatever terminal you use.

Using

Image


termplay-image 
Convert a single image to text

USAGE:
    termplay image [FLAGS] [OPTIONS] <IMAGE>

FLAGS:
    -k, --keep-size    Keep the frame size. Overrides -w and -h
        --help         Prints help information
    -V, --version      Prints version information

OPTIONS:
    -w, --width <width>            The max width of the frame
    -h, --height <height>          The max height of the frame
        --converter <converter>    How to convert the frame to ANSI. [default: truecolor] 
                                   [values: truecolor, 256-color, sixel]
        --ratio <ratio>            Change frame pixel width/height ratio (may or may not do
                                   anything) [default: 0]

ARGS:
    <IMAGE>    The image to convert

Video

termplay-video 
Play a video in your terminal

USAGE:
    termplay video [FLAGS] [OPTIONS] <VIDEO> [FRAMES]

FLAGS:
    -k, --keep-size    Keep the frame size. Overrides -w and -h
        --help         Prints help information
    -V, --version      Prints version information

OPTIONS:
    -w, --width <width>            The max width of the frame
    -h, --height <height>          The max height of the frame
        --converter <converter>    How to convert the frame to ANSI. [default: truecolor] 
                                   [values: truecolor, 256-color, sixel]
    -r, --rate <rate>              The framerate of the video [default: 10]
        --ratio <ratio>            Change frame pixel width/height ratio (may or may not do
                                   anything) [default: 0]

ARGS:
    <VIDEO>     The video file path to play
    <FRAMES>    The FRAMES parameter is the number of frames processed. It will be returned
                when you pre-process a video

YouTube

Replace video with ytdl, and supply a URL as VIDEO, and boom!
Watch from YouTube directly!

Also has --format (short -f) to supply formats to youtube-dl to change quality and stuff.

Pre-processing

If you feel like playing a video multiple times on the same settings,
you can pre-process a video.

That means doing all the processing part separately, so you can skip it if you do it multiple times.
Example:

$ termplay preprocess video.mp4
Checking ffmpeg... SUCCESS

Creating directory...
Starting conversion: Video -> Image...
Started new process.
Converting: Image -> Text
Processing frame622.png
Seems like we have reached the end
Converting: Video -> Music
Number of frames: 621
$ termplay video termplay-video 621 # 'termplay-video' is the default name for the processed folder.

Fun fact:
If you change the rate, you have to do it on both while pre-processing and while playing.
Or... don't. And enjoy playing the video in fast or slow motion.

Installing

... That said, it comes with a slight flaw. For now, you have to compile this yourself. No big deal.
You do need to install anything ears requires, though.
Other than that, this project is hosted on crates.io.
So to install you just need

cargo install termplay

On Ubuntu, a full installation from nothing (not even Rust installed) would look like

curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh
sudo apt install libopenal-dev libsndfile1-dev ffmpeg # FFmpeg if using video/ytdl feature
sudo -H pip install --upgrade youtube-dl # If using ytdl feature. Sudo is required if you're not using a single user python installation

cargo install termplay

Poof! targets/release/termplay is created