ASCII Video Generator ucc2

[_iPhoenix_]

Ahh so it just filled it all with char DB.

That's why I though a custom palette could be cool;)

[Jarren Long]

More or less. Here's the font I threw together for testing, minus the char->bitmap definitions. Wouldn't be too hard to +/- characters, or change colors once I can bust the charmaps out of the code and dump them into a config file.

[Jarren Long]

Latest Updates (not many):

 * Bunch of memory optimizations, now doing some of the processing in parallel, so I got a nice speed boost (ballpark of 7-8x faster) and memory reduction (about 70% less memory) in the image conversion process. Video conversion now only takes about a minute for every second of video to process at higher quality settings with coloring enabled. Only a minute :/
 * Fonts are now XML-file configurable; characters used for output can be added/removed at will, and the font bitmap can be changed too. I have three fonts right now, all based on the same bitmaps
 - Full set: 69 possible output characters (all printable characters from ASCII 1-128) - Slowest, best results
 - Only Symbols: Full set, minus all letters/numbers - Middle ground for speed vs. accuracy
 - Two character Set: It's either a # or a space - Fastest, edge resolution leaves a bit to be desired
 * Added a command line program that can be used to call the API. Takes an input image, some flags, and spits out the result to a destination file
 * Now have a "rescale" option, lets the output image be scaled back to the same size as the input image to fix some of the distortion problems (Console app only right now, need to add a checkbox to the WinForms test app to toggle it)
 * With exception to the code snippets that handle the FFMPEG/AVI formats, everything is written in pure C#, should be easy to port to other .NET platforms now
 
B&W Video Test: https://www.booksnbytes.net/test-out-noColor.mp4
Color Video Test: https://www.booksnbytes.net/test-out-q80-e30-c8.mp4

[ordelore]

This is looking really neat! i'm particularly impressed with how accurate the color ascii looks. It kinda reminds me of late 90s PC game illustration.

[_iPhoenix_]

This is looking really neat! i'm particularly impressed with how accurate the color ascii looks. It kinda reminds me of late 90s PC game illustration.

I agree; it looks very beautifully crappy in a very awesome nostalgic way.

[RalphDSpam]

Looks neat!

Just out of curiosity, how good is this as a "compression algorithm"?
If you put each frame of raw text in a file and zipped it, how would it compare to the original video?

[xlibman]

Looks awesome given the limitations!

[_iPhoenix_]

Looks awesome given the limitations!

No kidding!

Both entries (I’m making an [un]safe assumption that there are only two) are exceptional, and it will be quite the challenge to judge them.

I’ll probably enlist the help of some IRL friends to help me with the judging, and will post their results on the official unofficial thread.

[Jarren Long]

Now that the contest is over, I've released the source code for this atrocity, see https://github.com/JarrenLong/bmp2ascii, in case anyone is interested in this big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey trainwreck, have at it! Hoping @Juju will be letting his out into the wild sometime soon too, I'm definitely curious to see that magical goodness in action

[Juju]

Hoping @Juju will be letting his out into the wild sometime soon too, I'm definitely curious to see that magical goodness in action

I'm going to update my topic, you won't believe line 12! #clickbait

[xlibman]

I wonder how is the performance like, considering that some softwares have trouble displaying text at a reasonable speed. Even the TI-84+ OS font display had that problem, to the point where ASM sprites were actually faster