[NBLUG/talk] Ascii DVD players?

troy fryman at sonic.net
Fri Oct 1 16:23:48 PDT 2004


On Fri, Oct 01, 2004 at 04:07:29PM -0700, A'fish'ionado wrote:
> I'm running a Dell Inspiron 1000 laptop dual-booating Windows XP and
> SuSE 9.0. DVDs play well enough under Windows, but I'm wondering what
> options I have for playing DVDs under Linux.
> 
> At the moment, playing DVDs under Windows is probably enough for me,
> but I'm just dying to know--is there a DVD player that uses aalib or
> libcaca to play in Ascii? I just think that would be really neat. :-)
> (I know, I don't have a life.)

Mplayer will use aalib for video output.  I use pre-built debian
packages, so I'm not sure if you need to add any ./configure flags when
building mplayer from source. (hmm., maybe --with-aalib ?)

The command is: 
mplayer -vo aa dvd://1

"vo" is short for "video output".  Try 'mplayer -vo help' to see
available outputs.  The dvd://1 syntax assumes /dev/dvd is a symlink to
your dvd playing device.

And no, you're not crazy.  Watching video's in ascii is good fun,
especially from a distance!  :-)

-troy 




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