ASCII Movie Player (Quicktime/Terminal for Mac OS X)

This is probably the coolest freebie app I’ve seen. It uses Quicktime to draw out movies in ASCII through the Mac OS X Terminal. Schwing. Full sound support. You may need to resize the terminal to cover the full-screen of your mac to see the clip properly.

Requires: Quicktime 6 or 7, on Mac OS X 10.3 or 10.4+

Installation Instructions: (by me)

1. Download the linked app.
— UPDATE: There’s actually a color version as well. (thanks iMeowBot) I don’t think it’s as good but it’s not bad. The Terminal can only display 16 different colors, so you’ll see some odd colors elsewhere.

2. Open a new Finder window and press Apple+Shift+G.
3. Enter: /usr/bin
— (and press enter)
4. Drag the “ASCIIMoviePlayer” app (only the file with the black console icon) to /usr/bin

Usage:
1. Open the Terminal from /Applications/Utilities.
2. For this example, we’ll open a movie file off the Desktop. So, copy a movie there, and then, in the Terminal, type: cd Desktop
3. Now, type: ASCIIMoviePlayer “nameofyourmovie.mov”
— Tip: If you can’t find your movie’s name, instead of typing that, first type simply “ls” (that’s ‘ell-ess’) without the quotes for a list of files.

Ta-da.