this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2025
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I wrote a program that turns the feed it receives from your webcam in ASCII art. It's open source: you can find the code on Github.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

At a glance I thought it says "finedude"

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

As others have mentioned, the line width makes it not work so well on mobile, even when putting it into landscape mode.

On desktop though it works. Until I leaned forwards and the undefineds start flying outwards from me.

Very neat project though!!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

That picture goes hard

[–] BradleyUffner 5 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

It seems to be broken.

Update: it works on my desktop, but not on my phone or laptop.

When it does work, it's pretty good, though it could use some control to tune in exposure to pick up darker areas.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago

Correct, it may not work on mobile because the font size is 6pt and the line may be too wide for a phone. That's something I should fix. The exposure, however, probably just needs a slider to increase or decrease what is considered black.

Thanks for the honest feedback :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I assume from that screenshot that there isn't color support, but if you're on Linux, you can do something similar locally with color support:

$ mpv -vo caca /dev/video0

At least on my Debian Trixie system, it looks like they aren't building mpv with aalib support anymore, an older monochrome image-to-text library, just libcaca, but I know that in the past mpv and mplayer have supported that as well.

This will, among other things, permit viewing video on a plain text console.

[–] sicjoke 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

Now how can i direct this into a Teams or Zoom call. Make it Matrix style and that’ll be even more fun

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

That is wicked cool!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I remember when YouTube had a filter option to watch videos in ASCII for April Fools one year. Now I can do it whenever I want :D

[–] DiggyDiggyMole 3 points 2 days ago

You'll love VLC's caca support: https://wiki.videolan.org/Video_Output/

(fun fact: "Kaka" in German is child's speech for "poop". Seems to be the same in French , looking at libcaca's page)