TerminalVideoPlayer 1.1.0

A TUI video player.

Terminal Video Player

A Python ASCII Video Player in the Terminal with the ability to play video and audio both live and prerendered.

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Video Demo

Features

• Live rendering so you can watch videos without waiting for them to be rendered.
• Pre rendering so you can watch videos at higher resolutions and framerates for better detail.
• Plays audio simultaniously with the video.
• Video resolution scales with terminal size.
• Custom Framerates

Usage Tutorial

When you run the program you will be prompted to configure a few settings each time you want to watch a video. Here is an explanation of all of them.

Setting	Options	Explanation
Render Mode	'l'/'p'	This lets you select how you want to render the video. Whether to render it as you ware watching or to render it all beforehand.
Colour	'y'/'n'	Lets you choose whether to render the video coloured or using ASCII.
Quality	'h'/'l'	This lets you select how many ASCII characters to use when displaying the video.
Reverse Colours	'y'/'n'	This setting lets you reverse the colourmap where more full characters like "@" and "$" are moved to the back and empty characters like " " and "." are moved to the front.
Enabled Audio	'y'/'n'	Lets you decide whether to play audio with the video. Note the audio has to be a seperate audio file (ideally of the corresponding video).
Framerate	A Number	This lets you choose the framerate to play the video back at.

You will need to have the video you want to watch downloaded seperately from the audio of the video.

Changing Resolution

To change the video resolution quickly you need to zoom out/in in the terminal and/or change the font size. To zoom in or out quickly in the Windows terminal hold CRTL+Scroll. You need to adjust this before decoding the video. The program will warn you to adjust your resolution before continuing.

Extra explanations

Some of the options have extra things that should be remembered when using this program.

Render Mode

Live rendering lets you skip the wait to watch a video however is not reccomended at higher resolutions due to frame drops which if watching with audio can cause the audio to be ahead of the video. To avoid this I reccomend not watching videos at too large resolutions, ensuring the resolution of the video file is not too big (for reference I was able to watch a 480p video at 30fps with no frame drops with a terminal resolution of 470x120). The most important optimisation is reducing the quality of the original video.

Alternatively, you can watch using a pre rendered video which requires you to wait but lets you watch at higher resolution and framerates. However, this does use up more RAM and CPU whilst rendering as it needs to remember each frame and I suck at optimising.

Quality

The main thing of note is that low quality can represent a pixel as 1 of 10 ASCII characters whilst high can represent a pixel as 1 of 70 ASCII characters. From my testing (mostly with Bad Apple), the anti-aliasing is not the greatest.

Reverse Colours

This setting should be enabled if your terminal font is white/a lighter colour as otherwise it will look like the colours are reversed. Vice versa for people with a darker terminal font.

Enabled Audio

Enabling this will let you play audio along side the video. It will also prompt you to enter the filepath of the audio file you want to listen to but will not check if it is valid. If it is not then it will not play audio.

Framerate

For this if you want the audio to remain synced up with the video you should select a framerate which is a factor of the video. Let's say you are watching a 30fps video. The factors of 30 are 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 10, 15, and 30 so choosing any of those framerates will keep the video synced with the audio (assuming the video is able to maintain framerate)

Build & Run

This program has only been tested to run on Windows 11 so I cannot guarantee function on other platforms.

Windows

pip install TerminalVideoPlayer
terminal-video-player

Troubleshooting & Tips

• Make sure to adjust your terminal zoom before decoding to get desired resolution.
• 99% of the time you will not be able to display a resolution much larger than 480p in the terminal anyways from my testing so it is an easy optimisation to ensure the video you are rendering is 480p or less.
• If your video and audio are desyncing make sure your selected framerate is a factor of the framerate of the original.

AI Usage

ChatGPT was used for this project only to introduce me to optimisations such as some of the for loop optimisations like when converting Greyscale to ASCII, the del keyword to free up memory, and doing basic debugging with mismatched variable names.