On: Show HN: Choose Photo. Make Ascii

[alpb]

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

[iansinke → alpb]

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

[brettcvz → iansinke]

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

[coldskull → brettcvz]

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

[jbsilva → coldskull]

Try `mplayer -vo aa <video_file>`

[vhf → jbsilva]

  -vo caca <video_file>

to have it in color. :)

[alter8 → coldskull]

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

[w00kie → coldskull]

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! :)

[qq66 → coldskull]

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

[CountHackulus → coldskull]

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

[rosstafarian → coldskull]

telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

starwars done in ascii ;)

[pixelbath → rosstafarian]

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

[brettcvz → coldskull]

Do it! That would be awesome!