Cine

Utility that let's you convert images and videos to ASCII art. (Only tested on Linux right now.)

Overview

Written in Go, cine first scales the input image/gif/video to images/frames of the same size as that of the terminal (which is retrived from stty size) and then converts those into ASCII and then prints them on the screen in a loop. The output can be displayed in the terminal with color glyphs or as grayscale or as just colors (kinda like timg but pixelated), depending on flags included. Oh, it uses ANSI BTW (like how I use arch BTW).

Features

• Convert images and videos to ASCII art.
• Supports everything ffmpeg can handle.
• Support for colored & grayscale with both color and without color output.
• Customizable character sets for ASCII representation.
• Automatic resizing based on terminal dimensions.

Installation

Apart from the programming language (Go) itself, the program utilizes ffmpeg for image processing and stty which are both called via os.Exec so both should be in PATH.

Usage

To run the program, use the following command format:

go run . -file <path_to_image_or_video> [-save <output_directory>] [-grayscale] [-no-font] [-charset <characters_string>]

Option	Description
-file	Path to the image or video file to be converted to ASCII art (required).
-save	Directory where the "cached" output files will be saved (default: ./cine-out).
-grayscale	If specified, the output will be displayed in grayscale instead of color (classic).
-no-font	If specified, only colors the background without printing any text characters.
-charset	Custom characters to use for ASCII representation (from lightest to darkest pixels).

Examples

go run . -file furret.jpg will print

go run . -file furret-dance.gif will print furret dance example

Known bugs & FAQs

1. Why are there extra black pixels? or The output looks the same as last one even after resizing the terminal. Why? Ans. Well, this is a known bug and it is because, the way the program is written, it is supposed to reuse the scaled frames instead of resizing everytime. At the moment, this saving function is not being used but this will be changed soon. A simple way to fix it is to delete the output folder (defaults to ./cine-out) before running the program or do both (like I do) by using &&.

2. Why is there only 1 file? Ans. I will organize the code some other time.

TODO

• Reuse the saved folders.
• Add flags like no-save or make save='' not save anything.
• More flags probably.
• Add more comments and documentation or hire an unpaid intern to write them for me (inside joke).
• GIF and video support.

Contributions

Fork the repo, make changes, submit PR, you know the drill. If you don't, then learn Git(Hub) or try my quickstart that I wrote for a friend.

Anything else?

Consider starring and supporting (IDK how) or drop an email or a message on Discord. I may be busy with a hackathon so may not work on this for a while. I hope you could understand my code tho xD.