Capture ASCII photo via mplayer

Mplayer

Mplayer which stands for movie player for linux and supports most video and audio formats. Its manpage is really long. Check this page for a tips and tricks for mplayer and the FAQ from multimedia.cx is a compilations of questions and answers from the #mplayer IRC channel.

Capture photo using mplayer into PNG file

You can capturing video and then convert the frame into png or other formats.

$ mplayer -vo png -frames 3 tv://

Let’s break it down:

• mplayer - movie player
• vo - Specify a priority list of video output drivers to be used
• png - Output each frame into a PNG file in the current directory
• frames - Play/convert only first frames, then quit.

The photo will be store in the current directory and saved as 0000000N.png. You can specify the directory to save the PNG files using outdir and specify the prefix to be used for the PNG filenames using prefix.

Here’s a spooky photo of Tigger from Winnie the pooh and friends.

ASCII-ART

Here’s the fun part! You can capture photo via the webcam into ASCII art using the caca library which is a colour ASCII Art library.

$ mplayer tv:// -vo caca -vf mirror -really-quiet setfont Uni1-VGA8

Break down:

• -really-quiet - Display even less output and status messages than with -quiet.

• -vf - Setup a chain of video filters.

• mirror - Mirrors the image on the Y axis.

• setfont - Setting font. The smaller the font – the better’s the output.

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Me in ASCII Art.

My pal Vaibhav and I.

Squint your eyes to see the images clearly.

Have fun!

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Resources

https://www.systutorials.com/how-to-capture-camera-photo-video-using-mplayer-on-linux/

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/man/en/mplayer.1.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220831170631/http://andrusiv.com/blog/tag/mplayer.html

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MPlayerTips https://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php?title=MPlayer_FAQ