bepri / png2t

A for-fun tool to display any FFMPEG-supported image/video file in a terminal.

🖼️ png2t 🎬

Who needs a GUI anyways?

What?

png2t is a fun little program that allows you to print out image or play a video format in a shell, so long as the shell supports ANSI escape codes!

How?

png2t was written entirely in Rust! It currently depends on FFMPEG being installed to the system, but later versions of this will hopefully use an internal image library rather than external shell calls. png2t decomposes videos into .exr image files of each of their frames, loads them into memory, then prints them as individual RGB pixels using ANSI Truecolor sequences. It even plays the sound!

Why?

It's cool!

Building

Unix

1. Install cargo to your system

Visit https://rustup.rs/ for installation instructions!

2. Install ffmpeg

Debian-based:

sudo apt install -y ffmpeg

Fedora-based:

sudo dnf install -y ffmpeg

3. Clone this repository

git clone [email protected]:bepri/png2t.git && cd png2t

4. Build

cargo build --release

Resulting binary will be at target/release/png2t

Windows

1. Install cargo on your system:

• Go here and download rustup-init.exe
• Run & follow prompts
• Install Visual Studio or the Visual C++ Build Tools, being sure to check the boxes for "C++ Tools" and "Windows 10 SDK"

2. Install FFMPEG for Windows

Downloads can be found at this link.

3. Clone this repository

git clone [email protected]:bepri/png2t.git && cd png2t

4. Build

cargo build --release

Resulting binary will be at target/release/png2t.exe

png2t's Issues

Add clean exit from a video

If a video ends, then it exits cleanly just fine. But if ctrl+c is pressed mid-video, drop is never called for Media and the temp directory never gets cleaned up.

What I would like to happen:

• Capture the q, ctrl+q, and ctrl+c keystrokes
• If any is read, finish printing the current frame then exit gracefully
• (Optional) leave the last frame printed visible every time the program exits, to make the printing behavior consistent with photo inputs.

Move away from calling FFMPEG with Command

A potential alternative could be https://crates.io/crates/gstreamer