ベン・ギルド (Ben Guild)

Play videos in your Mac OS X “Terminal” using a sample app hidden on Apple's Developer website 📺

Apple has a really cool sample project on their Developer website for playing videos back in the Terminal on your Mac:

The Mac OS X “Terminal”, displaying a video that's rendering into ASCII-based text.
For those of you who've used it before, the Terminal of course traditionally displays text (only), so this uses the ASCII character-set to approximate “pixels” into that space and create a text-based representation of what you'd normally see on screen.

You can download this yourself at the link above, and it actually ships with a binary-version that you can install on your Mac. — The system requirements are just that you have at least Quicktime 6 or 7 and Mac OS X 10.3 or later.

Installation and playback instructions:

  1. Open a new Finder window and press “Command (⌘) + Shift + G”, then use the dialog that appears to navigate to: /usr/bin
  2. Drag the “ASCIIMoviePlayer” binary file from the download into that folder. (The file will be the only one with a plain, black “Console”-esque icon.)
  3. To play a video file, for example, just type: ASCIIMoviePlayer "~/Desktop/nameofyourmovie.mov"

Awesome. 😎

UPDATE: There's actually a similar, color version available elsewhere as well. — I don't think it's as good, but it's not bad! (Thanks for the tip, iMeowBot.)