Jan 18, 2010
ASCIImeo, Videos in Text
Today I finally launched ASCIImeo (asciimeo.com), a personal project I’ve been working on irregularly for the past few months. In a nutshell, it renders Vimeo videos in different textmode’s. I hope everyone enjoy’s the site; it’s simple and generally useless, but a ton of fun to explore. I’d love to hear your feedback, rants, and bug reports (I was after all the only person working on this).
Here are some of my favorite videos in ASCII:
Metamorphosis by Glenn Marshall
MOTOR / AMBIENT REEL by KU-SCHNEIDER
Magnetic Ink by flight404
Still Run by DANTE NOU
Look At Me by Patrick Lawler
The player is an evolution of earlier video experiments I was doing in Alchemy. Still using Jari Komppa’s TextFX7 engine for the glyph conversion and AS3ANSI for the rendering, this version features improved speeds and a control UI including fullscreen mode.
When this project was first conceived, I had considered using the Youtube API, but after reading through their TOS that idea quickly vanished (obstructing the video is a violation). Vimeo didn’t pose the same problem, and in retrospect, it was a wiser choice considering the greater quality and style of most of their videos. Tying it to Vimeo was straightforward given the ease of their API and liberal cross-domain permissions (truly there is no better online video community). The only real challenge was brushing up on my rusty CSS skills to get the site displaying correctly cross-browser.
Speaking of challenges, there are still a number of unresolved issues that I hope will be ironed out in the future. The worst one occurs when the player encounters a redirected cross-domain policy file on one of the video servers (specifically vimeo.o4.bitgravity.com). Adobe states: “since version 9,0,115,0, however, Flash Player has treated redirected policy files as though they had originated from the final, post-redirect URL”. This means there’s no way to invoke the BitmapData.draw method for content on the pre-redirect URL without being thrown the dreaded #2122 error (sandbox violation). There’s no current workaround. Regardless, this only happens to a small percentage of videos and occasionally their location is shuffled around.
ASCII video players aren’t new, they’ve been developed on countless platforms including Flash (VLC Media Player had an ASCII filter, and even Apple released an ASCII Quicktime player). With ASCIImeo I really wanted to take advantage of the environment Flash can live in: online, interactive, and social. In the end, I think I’ve created something new from an old idea. You can be sure I’ll be rambling about this at FITC.
UPDATE: Thank you to the many individuals that reported the flakey search results. I’ve tightened up the calls to the Vimeo API and everything seems to be working well now.
Great project Peter!
Impressive performance, only in color mode it’s hard to process.
Congrats.
This is phenomenal! Wonderful work.
Possibly of interest, here’s a video of mine featuring abstract organic visuals. I think the silhouetted figures look especially great in the block ASCII mode.
http://www.asciimeo.com/6172626
[...] schaut euch mal dieses farbenfrohe Musikvideo an, das Original gibt es hier zum vergleichen.. via peternitsch Tags: 8bit, art, ASCII, Filter, Plugin, Vimeo honki · 18.01.2010 · Kategorie: [...]
Wonderful! This made my day. Thanks so much!
[...] Shared a link on Google Reader. ASCIImeo, Vimeo videos in text [...]
[...] ein Video-Spielzeug, das Vimeo-Videos in ASCII rendert. Hier die Seite, tonnenweise weitere Infos auf Nitschs Website und hier „Stand by me“ in der Version von Songs around the World in der ASCII-Version [...]
[...] Peter Nitsch Today I finally launched ASCIImeo (asciimeo.com), a personal project I’ve been working on irregularly for the past few months. In a nutshell, it renders Vimeo videos in different textmode’s. I hope everyone enjoy’s the site; it’s simple and generally useless, but a ton of fun to explore. […] [...]
correct me if i’m wrong but does the search only work from the home page? searching from a video doesn’t display results. try searching for love while already looking at a video, then search for love from the beginning.
[...] peter nitsch) Share [...]
Zoidberg, the Vimeo API seems to be flaking out a bit. I’m trying to tighten it up. Seems the more people that hit it, the worse it gets.
[...] more incl technical info on Peter’s blog. Video below is of Glenn Marshall’s generative app also available for the [...]
I love this Peter! (I made the Metamorphosis video).
Great video! Looks awesome in text.
great work Peter! love the ASCII art!
Bravo! Wonderful work.
That’s really funny, I clicked a link to your asciimeo site, randomly typed in the keyword ‘flower’, clicked on the first search result, which happened to be the Metamorphosis video. Really strange coincidence..
Anyway, just wanted to say congrats on a great, simple idea, executed to the hilt.
CRAZY ! It’s truly amazing with people faces! like I love pixel art I like this very much!
See how a gig (we filmed with 3 cameras) renders:
http://www.asciimeo.com/8728674
great job – offers a wonderful alternative view of these works. love you have done it – thank you on behalf of many people who will enjoy the fruits of your coding toils!
shane, director onedotzero, co-curator of decode at the v+a london.
[...] ist das avantgardistische projekt von peter nitsch. es wandelt ganz einfach vimeo-videos in ascii-videos um. der pure trip, wobei man sogar noch [...]
It’d be great if you redirected searches who’s search term is a full vimeo URL (or video ID) directly to the related video on ASCIImeo.
That way we can utilise Firefox’s ‘add keyword for search’ function so that prepending a vimeo url with ‘ascii’ in the address bar would load the ASCIImeo version of the same video.
[...] ASCIImeo is a video player which renders Vimeo videos in ASCII codes, more precisely in different text-modes… By switching to three different ASCII modes: color ascii, block and simple ascii, as a viewer you can get the more imaginative and creative image on programming and the art of mathematics. Indeed, my friendz… code is a poetry… but not everyone is able to comprehend it in a mathematical way, nor more in a dreamy variant, as I do… [...]
This is a pretty cool project, I had fun viewing my videos in block format. Great work.
[...] Aunque tarda bastante en realizar la conversión, el resultado es bastante divertido y técnicamente atractivo. Si queréis ver un ejemplo acceded a http://asciimeo.com/1747316, por ejemplo, o a cualquiera de los recomendados por su creador en su blog. [...]
[...] Aunque tarda bastante en realizar la conversión, el resultado es bastante divertido y técnicamente atractivo. Si queréis ver un ejemplo acceded a http://asciimeo.com/1747316 o a cualquiera de los recomendados por su creador en su blog. [...]
[...] Aunque tarda bastante en realizar la conversión, el resultado es bastante divertido y técnicamente atractivo. Si queréis ver un ejemplo acceded a http://asciimeo.com/1747316 o a cualquiera de los recomendados por su creador en su blog. [...]
[...] es un proyecto de Peter Nitsch, que según comenta lo realizo en los últimos meses en sus tiempos libres. En su blog comenta [...]
superb!!!
just unfortunately doesnt play my new vid… maybe a bug?
http://www.asciimeo.com/7932490
….
claus, that video encounters the problem I wrote about above in the blog post. the video sits on a server that has a redirected cross-domain policy file. adobe didn’t allow certain operations to occur in Flash Player without those permissions. nothing i can do unfortunately.
Cool!
Now include 8bit 11kHz sound!
[...] + Vimeo) * Peter Nitsch = ASCIImeo von Arne in Spielkram Tags: ascii tool video Wenn dir dieser Artikel gefallen [...]
[...] von Peter Nitsch konvertiert jedes beliebige Vimeo-Video in eine ASCII-Animation. Komplett nutzlos, wie Peter Nitsch [...]
[...] sirva de mucho… es curioso ver un vídeo convertido a texto. Si no sabéis que buscar, en el blog del autor se recomiendan unos cuantos [...]
brilliant. congrats, it’s beautiful.
great job.
please provide me name of the font that ASCIImeo is written. it is very nice I must have it.
Thanks dada. The font is actually a bitmap that can be found in Cleaner’s great Ansilove project http://ansilove.sourceforge.net/ . It’s the 80×50 PNG. I needed it in that format for fast drawing operations.
[...] ASCIImeo geht noch einen Schritt weiter, dort werden Filmsequenzen mit dieser Technik umgesetzt, zum Beispiel mit “Metamorphosis on ASCIImeo“. Tipp: Etwas Abstand halten und die Augen leicht zusammen kneifen, dann nimmt der Durchblick zu. [...]
Congratulations man! I really enjoy it this from another point of view… very cool!
hugs! take care and good luck! ]
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[...] mehr die Schlagzeilen beherrscht, läuft mir ein alter Bekannter mal wieder über den weg: ASCII. Peter Nitsch hat einen Video-Renderer online gestellt, welcher Vimeo-Videos in ASCII rendert. Er nennt das dann [...]
it’s beautiful, great job.
Nice thank you for the information.
Bravo! Wonderful work.
Excellent work! Do you think you could do a telnet version with the option of escaped colors? I’d love to be able to view web video on a VT241.