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Show HN: A Simple terminal-based video chat – renders in ASCII and has audio

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Re: Show HN: A Simple terminal-based video chat – renders in ASCII and has audio

#31

Post by vidarh »

SwellJoe wrote: post #17
qopp wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it would actually be "harder" to encrypt since it wouldn't be as compressible as normal video (if you lower the resolution to match). Note you can tunnel arbitrary ports in ssh for data if that's what you're thinking of.

Text is extremely compress-able. Admittedly, this is not common text, and is many "snapshots" of the whole screen, but I believe LZ-based compression would still be extremely effective on this data. The OP above said it can only be one of ten characters, and one of 256 colors, and a 100x40 grid, so it would likely require similar data rates to get this level of quality from a video stream, I would think, since the 10…

The text here may compress well, but only because the original video has been "decompressed" into an incredibly inefficient encoding in the first place. If you want to transmit this efficiently, then downscaling the original video and encoding it efficiently using a standard video codec and rendering it to text client side would be vastly more efficient.

Re: Show HN: A Simple terminal-based video chat – renders in ASCII and has audio

#32

Post by akavel »

emgram769 wrote: post #16
bwy wrote: post #5

This is awesome! Wonder how it compares with mine (github.com/billyeh/termchat). Would love to share notes with the maker, since audio was something I did not even consider while I was making it. The image processing part is fun, though!

I helped create it at a recent hackathon. the ascii is rendered by calculating the intensity of any given pixel, mapping that intensity to a character based on how much that character fills up space ('@' would be bright and '.' would be dark) and then approximating the color of the pixel to fit within the 256 available I've noticed your implementation uses websockets, which are built on top of TCP. we used UDP and en…

Also have a look at:

http://aa-project.sourceforge.net/aalib/

http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/libcaca

and possibly other clones too. Might help improve the visuals.

Re: Show HN: A Simple terminal-based video chat – renders in ASCII and has audio

#33

Post by failed_ideas »

That's pretty awesome, now if I can fins a decent terminal browser that supports javascript and vim keybindings and the equivalent of chromes devtools, I can spend all of my time in the terminal (save design of course, but that wouldn't even make any sense). It's probably unreasonable to think that I'll fin that, but I'll keep looking.

Re: Show HN: A Simple terminal-based video chat – renders in ASCII and has audio

#35

Post by outworlder »

bwy wrote: post #5

This is awesome! Wonder how it compares with mine (github.com/billyeh/termchat). Would love to share notes with the maker, since audio was something I did not even consider while I was making it. The image processing part is fun, though!

While I do find image processing fun too, why not just use libAA?

Re: Show HN: A Simple terminal-based video chat – renders in ASCII and has audio

#36

Post by minikomi »

13 wrote: post #19
emgram769 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I helped create it at a recent hackathon. the ascii is rendered by calculating the intensity of any given pixel, mapping that intensity to a character based on how much that character fills up space ('@' would be bright and '.' would be dark) and then approximating the color of the pixel to fit within the 256 available I've noticed your implementation uses websockets, which are built on top of TCP. we used UDP and en…

You can go a bit further to get significantly higher color depths using ASCII block characters 176, 177, 178. By using the foreground and background ANSI colors and blending them by using these three characters (25%, 50%, 75%) you can achieve some quite realistic images. If you're more interested in resolution, using half block characters like 220 and 223 can allow you to double your vertical resolution at the cost o…

I've tried doing this before but wasn't fully satisfied with my color lookup (very basic - really, even a hash table would do the way I made it..) https://github.com/minikomi/ansipix

Do you have any good examples of calculating the right foreground/background colors to use?

Re: Show HN: A Simple terminal-based video chat – renders in ASCII and has audio

#37

Post by [deleted] »

ledzep2 wrote: post #28
13 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://csl.name/jp2a/

Thanks. It would be better to have some navigation functions like what you can do on Windows with the default image preview program, so that users can browse through a series of images without having to convert them one by one.

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: A Simple terminal-based video chat – renders in ASCII and has audio

#40

Post by emgram769 »

rhgraysonii wrote: post #39

:( Anyone get the error "VIDIOC_STREAMON: Invalid argument libv4l2: error turning on stream: Invalid argument Can't seem to get it to work trying anything on github etc and want to get enough around to file a real issue.

We actually got this error as well and had to update to a newer version of OpenCV. 2.4.10 seemed to fix it
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