Play movies as ASCII Characters

Do you like the matrix movies? If that is so, then you must have noticed the very cool ASCII characters in there. The green text that are a bunch of computer codes that are very complex yet very awesome at the same time. Which gives the feeling of being inside a computer program. It just so happens that VLC media player can also create that awesome effect to your videos. This tutorial will be guiding you on how to enable that effect. So let's get started!

What is ASCII characters?

The ASCII(pronounced as ask-ee) or ( American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a character encoding standard for electronic communication , this are the codes that represent as text in computers and telecommunications equipment. They represent the basic alphabetic, numeric and symbolic characters. That was according to wikipedia

ASCII art

This is a graphic design technique that uses computer for presentation and consist of pictures that are pieced together from the ASCII characters to create a unique visual art. wikipedia

Now that you know what an ASCII character is, let us get started with the tutorial.

First up is, open your vlc media player. If you still haven't installed it yet, click on this link: https://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.html there you will be able to download there software for free. Just click on Download or click the drop down menu and select your Operating System. This will automatically download the file into your computer.

After you have downloaded the file, install it to your computer then open it after the installation is complete.

Now that you have opened your vlc media player, click on Tools then select Preferences. This will open up a new window named Simple Preference. There are a bunch of options that we can tweak here, but that is for another tutorial. For now, let us focus on how to create a cool matrix-like effect.

After the Simple Preference window has opened, kindly click on the Video tab icon that is next to the Audio icon.

After clicking it, you will be given with a lot of options that can change your video. Now, look at the Output option, this is where we will be editing something.

Now, click on the drop down menu, and select the Color ASCII art video output. This is the option that will give an effect of the ASCII art into your video.

After you have clicked it, hit Save then search for the video that you want to watch with the ASCII art on it.

Now, you can watch your movie that is in ASCII art. You can now feel the matrix vibe.

That is all for this tutorial, I hope this helped you in some way. Until next time!

ted7

signing out,

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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