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Watch Star Wars Episode IV in ASCII via Terminal
Authored by: thelamecamel on Apr 12, '06 08:06:47AM

Several years ago you ran a hint on a command line program (perhaps installed with the dev tools?) that did this for any quicktime movie. That command line program (last i checked) has since become an example program on Apple's Developer Site.



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Watch Star Wars Episode IV in ASCII via Terminal
Authored by: kjbuckley on Apr 12, '06 09:06:44AM

http://developer.apple.com/samplecode/ASCIIMoviePlayerSample/ASCIIMoviePlayerSample.html



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Watch Star Wars Episode IV in ASCII via Terminal
Authored by: sweyhrich on Apr 12, '06 06:50:57PM

The ASCIIMoviePlayer really interests me, but I am STUCK on how to execute the darn thing in Terminal. I've put the ASCIIMoviePlayer Unix Executable file in my ~/.bin directory, but when I type "ASCIIMoviePlayer i.mov" while I am in the directory where i.mov lives, I just get a "command not found" error.


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Steven Weyhrich
http://apple2history.org



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Watch Star Wars Episode IV in ASCII via Terminal
Authored by: chepner on Apr 13, '06 07:03:07AM
The ASCIIMoviePlayer really interests me, but I am STUCK on how to execute the darn thing in Terminal. I've put the ASCIIMoviePlayer Unix Executable file in my ~/.bin directory, but when I type "ASCIIMoviePlayer i.mov" while I am in the directory where i.mov lives, I just get a "command not found" error.
Your bin directory probably isn't in your path. Try: ~/.bin/ASCIIMoviePlayer i.mov

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ASCIIMoviePlayer COLOR
Authored by: Marius_Th on Apr 17, '06 01:56:41PM

or move it to "/usr/bin/" (Exactly as it stands, no changing usr in username)

also, here's a link to an modified ASCIIMoviePlayer that plays in color:
http://users.ugent.be/~jmaebe/ASCIIMoviePlayerSample/



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Watch Star Wars Episode IV in ASCII via Terminal
Authored by: babbage on Apr 12, '06 11:19:54AM
>Not the same thing.

The ASCII Quicktime example uses the Quicktime engine to render arbitrary Quicktime visual content (images or video) as plain ASCII text. Basically, it takes a cluster of pixels in the image and selects the ASCII character that best resembles that pattern. It works surprisingly well, but to get good results you should set your terminal fairly wide to leave enough room for it to render.

By contrast, the Star Wars ASCII guy has been hand-converting the original Star Wars movie to a series of ASCII frames, one by one, for several years now -- at least as far back as the late 90s. He is *not* trying to replicate it pixel-for-pixel though. This is more like taking each frame of the movie and making hand-drawn cartoons, then stacking them up to make a flip-book movie that gets the story across in reduced, cartoony format.

If you don't want to run it via telnet, you can see the same animation in a Java applet on his web site, at http://www.asciimation.co.nz/. The guy who turned it into a telnet parlor trick has an article about it all from The Register on his web site, at http://www.blinkenlights.nl/thereg/ . As I say, this has been a work in progress for years now, and at the rate it has been going, it'll probably be another decade before the project is finished. :-)

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DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL

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Watch Star Wars Episode IV in ASCII via Terminal
Authored by: tripleman on May 09, '06 12:02:24AM

I can't believe they made it a universal binary.



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