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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

#21

Post by dhotson »

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 made something similar to this using a combination of 256 color mode and unicode halftone characters for "dithering" between the foreground/background colors.

https://github.com/dhotson/txtcam

Another thing I'd like to try to get a bit more resolution is to perhaps use the braille character set in combination with 256 color mode: https://github.com/asciimoo/drawille

Also, some terminals are starting to support 24bit color (iTerm2 nightlies) which could pretty drastically improve the possibilities of terminal based video: https://github.com/frytaz/txtcam/tree/color :)

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

#22

Post by emgram769 »

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…

the blending sounds like a good idea, even without the blocks p2pvc makes no use of background color

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

#28

Post by ledzep2 »

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

It would be awesome if it supports XMPP/SIP. And btw is there a image previewer for terminal?

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.

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

#29

Post by tunula »

dangayle wrote: post #18
jacobparker wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it be any easier to encrypt? It's data just the same. I wouldn't rely on terrible quality video for plausible deniability but if you want to there are of course many ways to make your webcam feed shitty looking.

Easier in the sense of less data, which would make it faster. One of the issues with encrypted video chat is that most implementations have a max amount of people you can chat with because of the computing overhead.

If your goal was less data through degraded quality though, you've got much better options than a text stream.

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

#30

Post by vidarh »

dangayle wrote: post #18
jacobparker wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it be any easier to encrypt? It's data just the same. I wouldn't rely on terrible quality video for plausible deniability but if you want to there are of course many ways to make your webcam feed shitty looking.

Easier in the sense of less data, which would make it faster. One of the issues with encrypted video chat is that most implementations have a max amount of people you can chat with because of the computing overhead.

It's only less data because the resolution is low. You'd get exactly the same result with "normal" video chat by reducing the resolution.
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