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

https://github.com/mofarrell/p2pvc

by emgram769 • 11 years ago

375 44 11 years ago

github.com

imcn• 11 years ago

Really cool. I like the idea a lot.

ivan_ah• 11 years ago

Who needs skype when you've got ascii...

colmvp• 11 years ago

The dream of the 60s is alive in your computer

shitgoose• 11 years ago

Very nice!

bwy• 11 years ago

This is awesome! Wonder how it compares with mine (github.com/billyeh/termchat). Would love to share notes with the maker, since audio was something I did not even consider while I was making it. The image processing part is fun, though!

emgram7694• 11 years ago

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 encapsulated everything is a pretty simple to use (and easily the most well documented part of the project) p2plib.c. the fear was that video and audio can get backed up if we were to use TCP. so audio and video were sent via UDP packets and rendered every time a UDP packet was recieved.

132• 11 years ago

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 of not being able to use the color trick.

akavel• 11 years ago

Also have a look at:

http://aa-project.sourceforge.net/aalib/

http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/libcaca

and possibly other clones too. Might help improve the visuals.

outworlder• 11 years ago

While I do find image processing fun too, why not just use libAA?

dangayle2• 11 years ago

Wouldn't something like this be easier to encrypt for transmission than normal video? Plus, in the case it comes up, "that ascii representation doesn't look anything like me and you can't prove it was me."

I like it.

jacobparker• 11 years ago

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.

dangayle2• 11 years ago

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.

qopp• 11 years ago

I think it would actually be "harder" to encrypt since it wouldn't be as compressible as normal video (if you lower the resolution to match).

Note you can tunnel arbitrary ports in ssh for data if that's what you're thinking of.

SwellJoe• 11 years ago

Text is extremely compress-able. Admittedly, this is not common text, and is many "snapshots" of the whole screen, but I believe LZ-based compression would still be extremely effective on this data. The OP above said it can only be one of ten characters, and one of 256 colors, and a 100x40 grid, so it would likely require similar data rates to get this level of quality from a video stream, I would think, since the 10 characters provide more visual information than a simple colored pixel of that size could convey.

Alfwich• 11 years ago

Needs ncurses headers

sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev

captn3m0• 11 years ago

Also pulseaudio headers:

sudo apt-get install libpulse-dev

zaroth• 11 years ago

It's almost too high fidelity. Wow.

One request - what's the bitrate? (I know it's probably possible to measure in 1 line of shell)

emgram7694• 11 years ago

well it is 100x40 in number of characters and there are 10 different characters that can take on one of 256 colors. that's 4000 x (8 (256 colors can be represented in 8 bits) + 4 (10 characters in 4 bits)) = 48Kb per frame, with about 20 fps. so maybe 120 KB/s?

ledzep23• 11 years ago

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

132• 11 years ago

https://csl.name/jp2a/

ledzep23• 11 years ago

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.

marquis2• 11 years ago

I recently started looking into building a similar web cam project using WebRTC, except sending ascii images over the datachannel instead of encoded video. So, I was pleased to see this project making it happen. You could easily implement this with XMPP/SIP over WebRTC.

ledzep23• 11 years ago

That's interesting. But if you already have a graphical browser which supports WebRTC, why do you still need the ascii? Or is there a terminal browser with WebRTC support?

CoryG89• 11 years ago

I made something like this once. Doing it in color is pretty awesome though.

aregularguy• 11 years ago

This would be awesome with audio. Stream audio over ssh and into a dependency like mplayer, and you have full a full, terminal chat application!

bybjorn• 11 years ago

It has audio.

thewizardofmys• 11 years ago

Amazing. Is the image(frames of the video) converted to ascii text in the server or on the terminal?

onderkalaci• 11 years ago

Its one of the most interesting github projects that I've seen so far!

failed_ideas• 11 years ago

That's pretty awesome, now if I can fins a decent terminal browser that supports javascript and vim keybindings and the equivalent of chromes devtools, I can spend all of my time in the terminal (save design of course, but that wouldn't even make any sense). It's probably unreasonable to think that I'll fin that, but I'll keep looking.

chappar• 11 years ago

Looks very cool. Sorry for nitpicking, there seems to be off by one at "ascii_values[min((intensity + 40) / 9, sizeof(ascii_values))];" :-)

rhgraysonii• 11 years ago

:( Anyone get the error

"VIDIOC_STREAMON: Invalid argument libv4l2: error turning on stream: Invalid argument

Can't seem to get it to work trying anything on github etc and want to get enough around to file a real issue.

emgram7694• 11 years ago

We actually got this error as well and had to update to a newer version of OpenCV. 2.4.10 seemed to fix it

atmosx• 11 years ago

p2pvc does not get around NAT, so you may need to port forward. It uses ports 55555 and 55556 for audio and video respectively.

Nice use case for IPv6.

zackmorris• 11 years ago

Unfortunately from what I understand, IPv6 has the option for NAT. Once it goes mainstream we'll probably find ourselves right back in this situation with multitudes of users stuck behind firewalls as second class netizens.

_lce0• 11 years ago

great project!!

I remember watching the world cup on an ASCII terminal

kfei• 11 years ago

The audio part is cool!

I made a similar project to this (but without sound).

https://github.com/kfei/sshcam

Which uses SSH connection, 256-colors, Unicode block characters and CIE94 algorithm to compute color distance when mapping colors to 256 palette.

Watch it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAa-pGda9kY

MyNameIsMK• 11 years ago

WOW

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

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