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Text-Based YouTube Video Player for Linux

hackedgadgets.com — Working on a command line Linux system and want to watch a YouTube video? Until now you were out of luck. Warren Harding has designed a program that reads in a YouTube video and plays it using ASCII text! This is a must see!

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  • mikelieman, on 10/11/2007, -11/+61Not "Program", at best "Script" would apply to the integration between Lynx and Mplayer with the aalib linked in.

    • weizbox, on 10/11/2007, -2/+18yea! lets digg him down for stating facts! rawr! ;)
    • jordan314, on 10/11/2007, -0/+24Yeah, not even a script, he does it all manually including saving the video by hand, retyping URLs and launching mplayer manually. Boy, that was easy.
      • Drood, on 10/11/2007, -21/+3It's also retarded. This is the problem with Linux users. (And I say that as a former one.) Just think what they could do if they diverted the time and effort they spent cocking about with idotic crap like this into something worthwhile. This is basically a video of TYPING. YouTube may be the first big internet thing that doesn't suck (usually) but this is just idiocy. "Look what I did... It's utterly pointless, the "video" output is pointless unless you squint, and it took me 10 minutes to actually do it. I'm so 1337."

        People like that are why I quit using Linux.
        • Fratm, on 10/11/2007, -1/+14"People like that are why I quit using Linux."

          You let the actions of other people decide your os for you? How sad for you.

          -Fratm
        • MindStalker, on 10/11/2007, -2/+3Whats sad is he spends a huge amount of time typing the full URL when you only need the videoid= and t=
        • demonstar55, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3aalib actually displays quiet nicely, obviously you have never used it before.
        • DoctaStooge, on 10/11/2007, -2/+4Drood, this guy is a classic hacker, he is doing it, not because it makes things better, but because he wanted to try it and got it done. Also, a Linux users does not have to be a programmer. A casual user who just surfs the net can be considered a "Linux user" as long as they use a Linux operating system.
        • kainalu, on 10/11/2007, -0/+0sad that someone would choose a lesser OS just because someone else decided to have a little fun with their life and write a program... loser
      • mark13, on 10/11/2007, -0/+7...on top of that, it /does/ work even when X is running. Simply launch as:
        mplayer -vo aa favoritepr0n.avi

        You can even have color when you use -vo caca instead of aa.
    • resplence, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1Question answered below, nevermind.
    • SamKellett, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1He should use it to watch the video of himself using the program. Aaaah!
    • bemenaker, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Reminds me of an old telnet front end for quake. Rendered the client in ascii.
    • joelhardi, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2Agreed. Even "script" is too generous.

      "mplayer -vo caca filename" uses libcaca for *color* ASCII output which is even more 1337.
  • ZentraediElite, on 10/11/2007, -8/+96This is awesome. Useless, but awesome.
    • robdiggity, on 10/11/2007, -0/+23Agreed. And my man in the video needs to install him some gpm and learn to cut and paste. Swear to god more than half of the video was him retyping youtube video_ids and session hashes BY HAND.
    • theonlyvlad, on 10/11/2007, -5/+104:30 is how long it took for the video to start playing. For a youtube video. That you can't even see all that well.

      No other time has the phrase "linux is free if your time is worthless" been true-er than right now.
    • moocow1452, on 10/11/2007, -4/+3"It's so... Unneccesery."
    • paku, on 10/11/2007, -0/+8It reminds me of watching scrambled porn.
    • EarlOfLade, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2Watching porn will never be the same,.

      Typing the URL to Youtube took longer than it took to watch the damn video.
    • EarlOfLade, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1
    • dbr_onix, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1"This is awesome. Useless, but awesome."
      It's epically useless given that mplayer can directly output the video the the graphics card, without requiring a window manager of any kind (Horrible technical description, but basically "mplayer [filename]" should be able to play full colour video without having to resort to displaying it in ASCII)

      Pointlessness aside - I wonder if anyone has made a text-based front end for Youtube - Instead of having to look though horribly rendered web pages and manually find .flv URL's and download them, you'd just enter a search term, and you'd get a nice list of videos, scroll through them, click on the one you wish to view, and it automatically runs mplayer or such
  • schestowitz, on 10/11/2007, -14/+7Finally. The famous ASCII Start Wars will finally be accompanied by thousands/millions of other films. Since it's a script, however, it won't be running on minimal text-only devices.
    • virtualball, on 10/11/2007, -7/+2Umm... VLC could do this for a REAL long time using AALib/BBLib. Search for it on google. I bet this is what this is using, it gets the youtube video then outputs it thru AALib..
  • kazamx, on 10/11/2007, -6/+24lol, too geek for words. Cool
  • machambi, on 10/11/2007, -9/+7OH MY GOD !!! the geek the geek !!!
  • shadowspawn, on 10/11/2007, -5/+5but can it play deep ascii?
    • mark13, on 10/11/2007, -1/+3Google "deep ascii" before you bury parent.
      Ignorants. :|
  • radius7, on 10/11/2007, -4/+48Cool ,
    So , wht's next ? "HDTV ASCII Video" ?
    • JJP0223, on 10/11/2007, -1/+10No, ASCII youtube video app for your iPhone.
    • potterboy, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Open up a HD clip in VLC using ASCII mode.
    • SmokenMirror, on 10/11/2007, -0/+0That would ASCII HD, get with the program :)
  • unusualbob, on 10/11/2007, -4/+5now all that is left is to imbed it into the browser, and make an image viewer for it too
  • imaclatchie, on 10/11/2007, -7/+2Ranks right up there with "Edlin 3.0 for Windows"
  • stafford72, on 10/11/2007, -7/+0Huh, I had no idea our 29th president was such a wiz with Linux.
  • insomniac8400, on 10/11/2007, -4/+51Does it convert sound to morse code so that it can be played with system beeps?
  • c2mfj, on 10/11/2007, -2/+15That video is about 5 minutes too long. Cool though.
    • OpticalLiam, on 10/11/2007, -1/+7I like how it took him a minute and a half to type in the URL
      • migitalwarfare, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4yes, because command line linux is so awesome. why in the hell would you want to watch a music video, in ascii, with no sound? somebody had too much time on their hands
  • Rupan, on 10/11/2007, -2/+19if this had audio with it (it might just video silent) I would be going "***** yeah this is the *****" right now. But just ***** ascii video for all those commands with no sound ehh.... Even as a novelty it ranks low. But big mother ***** kudos for basically doing nothing but downloading a .flv from youtube playing it with mplayers established ascii playback mode (VLC has this too btw) and getting some blog to consider it a hack lol
    • Hellmark, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1You can have sound via this method, the video either was recorded without sound, or the machine he did it on had no soundcard. Also, there are ways to speed up the process (IE, copy and pasting the video ID rather than typing it out, or using a service that does it automatically for you).
  • PURDooM, on 10/11/2007, -2/+77He didn't design crap. He downloaded the FLV file for the youtube video (which you could already do) and played it in mplayer with aalib (which I remember doing 6 years ago).
    • c4mden, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1for those of you wondering 'how would i do that?' here's a link: http://www.oreilly.com/pub/h/4441 with a little tweaking, it looks pretty damn awesome, and mplayer can play damn near any video type. for the link impaired, type mplayer -vo aa video.avi

      if you have a webcam, you can even render yourself in ascii with this command (works fine in ubuntu if you have mplayer and a webcam installed) mplayer -vo aa tv:// -tv driver=v4l:width=352:height=288:outfmt=rgb24:device=/dev/video0:noaudio -flip
  • TheMrEman, on 10/11/2007, -4/+67Wow! They've pioneered a way to make YouTube videos look even crappier! What a break-through!


  • endlessfight, on 10/11/2007, -1/+18And who wouldn't want to have to manually enter a ridiculously long URL to watch a video?
  • stormgren, on 10/11/2007, -2/+45The example video sucked. Did we have to see him typing out the URL and watch the download progress for a full minute or two just to get to the actual point?

  • daleeburg, on 10/11/2007, -3/+1it would be great, if i was color blind.
    • Hellmark, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2there are ways to have color too, like with the caca video output.
  • joe91584, on 10/11/2007, -4/+1That's so neat.

    It reminds me of the days when I had a IBM 286..
    Something about it brings a tear to my eye.

    I just wish some one would post a guide to doing this and can it be recorded?
    Who knows you can all ways find a good use for text on a web page !!!

    Does this use the PC speaker to make sound too now that would be shocking.
  • GTPilot, on 10/11/2007, -1/+15skip ahead five minutes.
    • TacTics40, on 10/11/2007, -0/+0Yeah, I didn't really care to watch him painstakingly enter the damn url. Wasn't worth it for the video at the end...
  • ThatForumPlace, on 10/11/2007, -11/+4Hmmm... Windows is looking pretty good right about now
    • gavintlgold, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2It's not like linux users can't use Youtube or basically any other online video player... It's not like that's the best linux can get... That's about the worst-looking linux can get (but people might argue that it's the fastest and most useful linux can get).
  • sspirit, on 10/11/2007, -1/+7lol, i think vlc does the same, plus it works in colour ascii
    • fonik, on 10/11/2007, -1/+0they can both use the aa (black and white ascii) and caca (color ascii) libraries. I know this because I just wrote an xscreensaver that plays text-mode video. Next up, I'm going to have it download all the flash videos off of digg via rss :D
  • zovres, on 10/11/2007, -0/+23he's using mplayer which has been rendering videos in ascii for years. nothing new here.
  • Gunde, on 10/11/2007, -2/+28Wow, a video of a guy using five minutes to download a .flv file in Lynx and play it with MPlayer. Buried as nonsense.
  • Takuro, on 10/11/2007, -1/+6The actual video starts at -1:26 minutes.

    Just trying to save you from 4 minutes of boring command line stuff.
  • cogit0, on 10/11/2007, -1/+5Wow, you dont even see him load the video until about 4 minutes in. A good 2 minutes is spent just writing the video_id!!
    • cogit0, on 10/11/2007, -2/+1dammit, can't see what the other comments are in time while i write my own. Please bury. =(
  • ImaFraud, on 10/11/2007, -8/+1Amazing bit of programming. Props.
  • joshua5, on 10/11/2007, -2/+1that was so incredibly geeky but still cool. the video was way too long only the last few seconds were interesting
  • mohamedmansour, on 10/11/2007, -3/+2Very lame .... 4/5 of the video was watching him type the url and watch it... Why not just say
    > mplayer test.flv

    That is it ...
  • mattcoady, on 10/11/2007, -1/+5Damn it! Asciitube.com has already been registered.
  • Hellmark, on 10/11/2007, -1/+3Not anything new, but still cool.
  • boreiajr, on 10/11/2007, -4/+1I've been translated this article to portuguese:
    http://tradutorium.wordpress.com/2007/06/29/vendo-videos-do-youtube-em-modo-texto-linux/

    ;-)
  • ahhell, on 10/11/2007, -2/+1He could have at least used a cool video isn't of some ***** hiphop *****.
  • ashchristopher, on 10/11/2007, -1/+15Buried as inaccurate!

    Warren Harding didn't create a program to watch Youtube videos on the command line in ASCII; he just downloaded the .flv video and opened it in Mplayer. It isn't really that impressive unfortunately.
    • Manhigh, on 10/11/2007, -0/+7Not to mention the fact that he wasn't very good as a president either.
  • law1ess, on 10/11/2007, -1/+3Cool... This would have been useful back in the BBS days.
  • Felix57, on 10/11/2007, -4/+3this is awesome and also why I'm windows guy for now
    • xsxs, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1If you keep that attitude up, the train is going to leave without you. All aboard!?
  • jplevel, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3anyone remember ASCII Quake. It rendered Quake I in the same manner. Many more FPS on my 133 with ASCII quake then GL quake too :-)
  • brstilson, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3The first 4 minutes of this video were pointless.
  • SenorPez, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2tl;dw
  • th3space, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2Our 29th President is coding? From beyond the grave? That is the most awesome thing ever!
  • seanmc303, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2Could you just imagine how sweet the PS3 would look on that. SICK!
  • ballsanya, on 10/11/2007, -2/+1oh the convenience! With this, Linux will surely take over desktops this year...=p
  • melissawm, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1It's just a pity that this confirms the idea that linux is for geeks only and doesn't handle all the nice things in the world.. But it's cool for us geeks nonetheless ;)
  • Gudeldar, on 10/11/2007, -0/+10Dugg just for saying Linux instead of Ubuntu
  • shatdow, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3That is the slowest-typing l33t h4ck3r I've ever seen.
  • demonstar55, on 10/11/2007, -2/+1wow, if I knew I would get on the front page for this, I would have done it months ago...
  • arynne, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1nice, but... lloyd banks?!
    • qwerty121, on 10/11/2007, -0/+0I could swear he was looking for Lloyd's Get it shawty...
  • dcoolidge, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2Ya but is porn watchable?
  • raptordrew, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4Ironic the video posted is a Youtube video
    • vap0r, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3What would happen if you watched that video in the text player?
  • JDZitro, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1ya, now make it do XTube!
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