termplay 1.3.0

Play an image/video in your terminal!
termplay-1.3.0 is not a library.

termplay

Name by the awesome @tbodt

Are you a terminal fanboy like me?
Sure, but do you ever watch YouTube? In your terminal?

termplay is the tool to convert images to ANSI sequences.
But it also supports playing videos... and YouTube...
Written in the systems language Rust, it has some solid performance.

  • Sixels, TrueColor and 256-bit color
    • Sixels are slower, but has really good quality. Doesn't seem to work on higher resolutions though.
    • TrueColor is any RGB color, so while the quality isn't great, the colors look fantastic!
    • 256-bit color is the closest representation
    • Choose whatever is supported by your terminal and sounds cool to you.
  • Flexible
    • Change framerate, size and more using command line switches
  • Adapting size
    • Automatically scales the image to fit your terminal

When playing a video:

  • Concurrency
    • It's converting to ANSI while ffmpeg is still processing!
  • Audio/Frame Sync
    • If one frame in takes longer to load and the audio continues on,
    • don't just pretend nothing happened! Skip a few frames!
    • Get back on track!
  • Controls
    • Pause video with space
    • Control volume without arrow up and down keys
    • Cancel video with Ctrl+C

Example image
Or if you want to maintain ratio
(Landscape image from pexels.com)

Compatibility

This tool is tested in GNOME Terminal, Konsole and alacritty (glitchy but amazing framerate).
Might not be fully or supported at all by whatever terminal you use.

Using

Image

termplay-image 
Convert a single image to text

USAGE:
    termplay image [FLAGS] [OPTIONS] <IMAGE>

FLAGS:
    -k, --keep-size    Keep the frame size. Overrides -w and -h
        --help         Prints help information
    -V, --version      Prints version information

OPTIONS:
    -w, --width <width>            The max width of the frame
    -h, --height <height>          The max height of the frame
        --converter <converter>    How to convert the frame to ANSI. [default: truecolor]  [values: truecolor, 256
                                   -color, sixel]
        --ratio <ratio>            Change frame pixel width/height ratio (may or may not do anything) [default: 0]

ARGS:
    <IMAGE>    The image to convert

Video

termplay-video 
Play a video in your terminal

USAGE:
    termplay video [FLAGS] [OPTIONS] <VIDEO> [FRAMES]

FLAGS:
    -k, --keep-size    Keep the frame size. Overrides -w and -h
        --help         Prints help information
    -V, --version      Prints version information

OPTIONS:
    -w, --width <width>            The max width of the frame
    -h, --height <height>          The max height of the frame
        --converter <converter>    How to convert the frame to ANSI. [default: truecolor]  [values: truecolor, 256
                                   -color, sixel]
    -r, --rate <rate>              The framerate of the video [default: 10]
        --ratio <ratio>            Change frame pixel width/height ratio (may or may not do anything) [default: 0]

ARGS:
    <VIDEO>     The video file path to play
    <FRAMES>    The FRAMES parameter is the number of frames processed. It will be returned when you pre-process a
                video

YouTube

Replace video with ytdl, and supply a URL as VIDEO, and boom!
Watch from YouTube directly!

Also has --format (short -f) to supply formats to youtube-dl to change quality and stuff.

Screen

If termplay is compiled with screen support (enabled by default) and you use X11, you can watch a specific window... Live!
A hacky and barely functional screen_control feature (disabled by default) can also forward keypresses to that window.

This isn't very useful, but it's definitely cool!
TIP: To find your window ID, use

echo "ibase=16;$(xwininfo | grep "Window id:" | cut -d ' ' -f 4 | cut -c 3-)" | bc

termplay-screen 
Mirror your screen to the terminal

USAGE:
    termplay screen [FLAGS] [OPTIONS] <WINDOW>

FLAGS:
    -k, --keep-size    Keep the frame size. Overrides -w and -h
        --help         Prints help information
    -V, --version      Prints version information

OPTIONS:
    -w, --width <width>            The max width of the frame
    -h, --height <height>          The max height of the frame
        --converter <converter>    How to convert the frame to ANSI. [default: truecolor]  [values: truecolor, 256
                                   -color, sixel]
    -r, --rate <rate>              The framerate of the video [default: 10]
        --ratio <ratio>            Change frame pixel width/height ratio (may or may not do anything) [default: 0]

ARGS:
    <WINDOW>    The window to be captured

Pre-processing

If you feel like playing a video multiple times on the same settings,
you can pre-process a video.

That means doing all the processing part separately, so you can skip it if you do it multiple times.
Example:

$ termplay preprocess video.mp4
Checking ffmpeg... SUCCESS

Creating directory...
Starting conversion: Video -> Image...
Started new process.
Converting: Image -> Text
Processing frame622.png
Seems like we have reached the end
Converting: Video -> Music
Number of frames: 621
$ termplay video termplay-video 621 # 'termplay-video' is the default name for the processed folder.

Fun fact:
If you change the rate, you have to do it on both while pre-processing and while playing.
Or... don't. And enjoy playing the video in fast or slow motion.

Installing

... That said, it comes with a slight flaw. For now, you have to compile this yourself.

Compile time requirements

Rust v1.18 or more is required. See your Rust version with

rustc --version

Update rust with

rustup update stable

Compiling!

Other than that, this project is hosted on crates.io.
So to install you just need to run

cargo install termplay

Default features:

  • ctrlc
  • ears # Music support (Requires anything ears requires)
  • screen # Screen-mirroring support (Requires runtime dependency: "main")
  • sixel-sys # Sixel support (Requires runtime dependency: libsixel)

Disabled features:

  • redox_syscall # Redox support for Ctrl+C
  • screen_control # Really hacky thing you shouldn't use

To disable default features, run

cargo install termplay --no-default-features

To enable specific features, run

cargo install termplay --features "..."

where ... is a comma separated list of features.

Arch Linux

If you just want to get this running with default features, you can use the
AUR Package

Ubuntu

Example:

sudo apt install libopenal-dev libsndfile1-dev libsixel youtube-dl
cargo install termplay