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Show HN: Choose Photo. Make Ascii (dchang.mit.edu)
116 points by ananddass on Aug 9, 2012 | hide | past | favorite | 32 comments



My friend just learned how to code last week and was already able to make this. I'm impressed by the quality of codecademy


That's actually quite interesting. I wonder, what is the underlying algorithm? That's amazing for a first-week coder.


There's probably a lot of complicated ways of doing this, but to keep it simple you could probably just downscale the image, convert to black and white, and have an array which maps lightness ranges to ascii characters


Looking at the source, looks like he piped it through http://secret-wildwood-1014.herokuapp.com/, which looks like it does basic image to ascii conversions when you give it a url. Not sure if he spun that up, but it's cool in that now the app can be made all in js


what would really be cool is if someone creates a service that can turn videos into 'ascii art' videos....that would look beautiful...


Try `mplayer -vo aa <video_file>`


  -vo caca <video_file>
to have it in color. :)


Add telnet streaming for extra points, like they did to World Cup 2006: http://ascii-wm.net/doc.php


I wrote a program for playing video in ASCII on an OpenVMS console (VT220 orange text serial console) for a university project. I played the Matrix dojo fight scene for the final presentation, it was a big success! :)


YouTube had this for April Fool's, where you could watch any video in ASCII art.


libcaca to the rescue! http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/libcaca


telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

starwars done in ascii ;)


This is amazing. I was expecting an algorithmic conversion of the video, but...just, wow.


Do it! That would be awesome!


http://freecode.com/projects/jp2a < I use this in the console sometimes. Nice just to check the orientation of a photo or something, then e.g. rotate w/convert.


A friendly note: The official homepage is at http://csl.sublevel3.org/jp2a/


Oooh, this reminds me of something similar I made when I was 14 or 15. I made a program to do just this, but only with bitmaps. No Twitter Bootstrap or filepicker.io, though ;)

Web interface: http://minipenguin.com/bta/

Standalone source code: http://minipenguin.com/bta/bta.c


Cool web-app, if you like this you should try out libcaca[1] it has even been integrated with mplayer[2].

1 - http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/libcaca

2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VP5KvaWz6Dg


Or aalib <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAlib>, which I my opinion gives better results than libcaca for monochrome images. You might also enjoy their demo program bb (sudo apt-get install bb).



A bit of oneupmanship: ASCII projektor, which was an app from a few years ago that allowed you to create ASCII from video.

http://earthlingsoft.net/ASCII%20Projektor/


Put MIT in URL. Get clicks.


Pretty cool. I finally saw a practical use of filepicker.io!




This is fun. I made one of my '88 911:

http://kindel.com/porsche/Ascii


I remember making a python script in high school that did this same thing. If only FilePicker had existed then!


Mplayer has ASCII art output for videos, -vo aa . Can be fun :-)


Really fun! Nice implementation of photo to ascii.


Does it have an API?


[deleted]


p.p.s jp2a FTW.

and well der. Mplayer with ascii rendering. Pft. Of course. But you knew that right?


I flipped out the first time I saw mplayer ascii rendering. I'm thinking of projecting Rashomon ASCII-version at an art show sometime. Or any classic film with deeply emotional topics, intricate facial expressions, reduced to 7-bit projections.




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