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  ascii doggo

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  example doggo

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  camera struggles

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ascii-chat (Table S023)

Ever wanted to video chat... in ascii? Well now you can video conference with all your friends in the convenience of your own terminal! Our project lets you and a friend videochat from your terminal like other videochat programs, but with ours you connect peer-to-peer and get to see each other in ASCII.

Converting from Image to ASCII

We use a simple algorithms for converting images to ASCII based on the relative darkness of a subset of ASCII characters. Many existing image-to-ascii libraries use a grayscale in addition to the ascii characters themselves for shading. That isn't very fun, so our implementation uses no color variation in our ascii renderings. We use a Python PIL implementation of dithering, but I don't think it's actually working correctly yet. Nevertheless, the quality is quite good.

Sending Video

Our network bridge for sending the ASCII video is fun because it is set up to send any input it gets on stdin to the designated IP address. Thus ascii-chat is easily extensible to sending all sorts of information peer-to-peer.

Sound

We used ffmpeg to grab sound from laptop microphones and send to the peer computer over rtp. There is quite a delay in the sound, which we have yet to resolve.

Built With

• ffmpeg
• python
• shell
• vlc
• xdotool