Friday DevOps #1: if you're cool enough to watch video in console?

Hey folks, just a small reminder - it's Friday and it means, time for a good content!

If you're cool enough to watch your favourite anime in console?

Story

Ok, some story first. In 1997 (sic!) released first version of aa-lib, library which been allowing to display images In console for MS-DOS and Unix like systems. That day world has been changed!

Actually not, but I have a feeling that Wachowski bro... (you know) saw aa-lib demo called bb, before thay started with Matrix:

If you want to check it locally, on Ubuntu/Debian:

sudo apt install bb
bb

For MacOS you can build it from sources - https://github.com/artyfarty/bb-osx or run Ubuntu in Docker and run command above, finally it all working in console!

AA-project home could be found here - https://aa-project.sourceforge.net/

How to play video in console?!

Back to Naruto...the best player in the world - mplayer, has not very well known that days feature - do video output in different output destinations, for example console:

CACA_GEOMETRY=200x70  mplayer naruto-shippuden_Ep1.mp4 -vo caca

What? CACA? AA, BB now CACA? Yes :D

libCACA is a next iteration of AA, because AA had no colors, group enthusiasts around 2010 used the same idea, but added console colors.

CACA will help you to output video like on the first image of article.

As small bonus, you can have a cool tool to make ASCII versions of your photos and images:

# Install CACA Utils
sudo apt install caca-utils

# decrease console font size with Ctrl+Mouse_Scroll
img2txt -W 300 favicon.512x512.png