November 16, 2004

Curious, George: ascii video conversion? I have a strange little video project I'm working on, and would like to convert some of the video to moving ascii-text images. problem - all the conversion tools I can find are arcane *nix terminal-freakout stuff. And my Google-fu is getting me nowhere.

Does anyone know of a windows-based video-to-ascii video conversion tool, or at least a still-pic to ascii tool that can a) do batch conversion and b) output to a graphic file, not a .txt file?

posted by housepig 20 years ago
  • I don't have a patch whipped up, but Cycling 74's Jitter (commercial) is a programming language that handles video processing, and will spit out whatever your patch calls for, including stills and matrix to text conversion. Here is a reference of functions. If you're a student, there is a sizable discount.
  • My idea depends on how much film you want to do as it requires a lot of button clicking. You could output all your video to a still image sequence (at a resonable frame rate like 12-15fps) and then convert them individually with Ascii Generator (freeware). If this seems too daunting (animation is the boring man's art form) you might try contacting these dudes instead. Or maybe track down a photoshop plugin and bust out the batch processing. At 12 fps you'd only have to convert 72 images per minute, which is nuthin'.
  • woops, i mean 12x60 = 720 images a minute heh heh. still though, you have to suffer for your art!
  • for something as crappy as ascii art you could easily lower the frame rate down to 6-8 frames per second and truly cut corners. I bet it would look more fluid and less jittery at a slower frame rate.
  • It seems that VLC media player supports ASCII art as output under Windows.
  • On a related topic, I have been wanting to animate moving 3-D animation or use "live action" images (I have a 3-D shooting rig to shoot video in 3-D) in that thing that was all the rage where you crossed your eyes and could see a three dimensional image in a seemingly unrelated bunch of computer generated dots. Does anyone know if 1. this is possible, and 2. if my head will explode if I try to watch a moving version of one of those posters ;-)?
  • That would totally be like Scanners. Do it.
  • Seriously, though, I don't know if your eyes could follow moving images like that. Consider how much time it takes to get your eyes to settle in on a static image in one of those posters. I don't know if your brain could process that when the images are coming at you in so many frames per second. It'd make for an interesting experiment, though. You might be able to do a simple animation with Flash -- you just need to have all of the dot images generated.
  • middleclasstool: Ascii Matrix
  • No, no, I know the ascii animation works, I'm referring to what squidranch is talking about -- the 3d images that pop out of a pattern of dots if you unfocus your eyes. I'm saying that may not work for animation.
  • That is cool, btw, stray.
  • Ah! Sorry, MCT. I should make more of an effort to read things. :P
  • The nice little fractalzoomer Xaos can make 3d random dot stereogram animations.
  • You could output all your video to a still image sequence (at a resonable frame rate like 12-15fps) and then convert them individually with Ascii Generator (freeware). that's my fallback - but Ascii Gen doesn't export as image files, only as text. I have batching software to export the frames (Virtualdub) and to reassemble the output (MakeAVI) but the middle step is the problem. I had one image-to-ascii prog I tracked down that would export the Ascii out as bmp images, but I can't find it now... all my searches turn up AsciiGen.
  • I'll check out VLC more thoroughly, though - thanks for the info!
  • I got VLC to stream video using color ascii art, which is way cool, but I can't get it to save the output correctly, it saves but it's not the color ascii art, just the source video, and when I try to full-screen the window it cuts off a bit. Magic Ascii Studio World Bucket e-2000 Solution (warning: blink tags) might be more what you're looking for.
  • I got VLC to stream video using color ascii art, which is way cool can you give me a quick how-to? I'm picking through every menu I can, and finding nothing... and the Wiki & help files are somewhat less than.
  • scratch that - got it to play as ascii, at least. if you figure out an output setting to export it as such, please post.
  • VLC has a setting to output to file under File --> Network Stream --> Stream output --> settings Check "file" and fill in the bits. I have used this for other stuff, but not for the ASCII filter. Dunno if it helps.
  • just to follow up on this, VLC has ascii mode which is tres cool/ however im pretty sure that you can't export this to a video file. It's the same reason you can't take a gimp winsnap screenshot of a dvd or something playing in windows media player. Idealy youll want to avoid having to make the ascii video frame by frame which is just needless button clicking. as i like to say, 'there's more than one way to skin a hippy' so here's a work around: You need a video card that has video out and video in. If you're thinking about making videos on a pc i'd highly reccomend it. I have an ancient ati all in wonder 128 and it does fine. I've used it to make most of my stop motion films. in vlc when you've got your ascii video playing right click on the top bar and choose properties, then hack the command window props to change the font size up to where it nearly fills an 800x600 window and then record that playing live as video out to whatever device you have, dv cam, vcr, whatever. Then you just have to play the recorded movie into the line in and rerecord it. Afterwards you can crop out the windows background and viola your own ascii video.