asciyx

A simple weekend project. No pretensions.

Converts video files into ASCII art video output. Each frame is rendered by mapping pixel luminance to characters from a configurable density ramp, producing either a new encoded video or a live terminal preview.

Two character modes are available: standard ASCII (8x8 bitmap cells) and Japanese katakana (16x8 bitmap cells).

Requirements

• ffmpeg and ffprobe available in PATH

Building

cargo build --release

The binary will be at target/release/asciyx.

Usage

asciyx [OPTIONS]

Arguments

Flag	Short	Type	Default	Description
--input	-i	<path>	video.mp4	Path to the input video file
--output	-o	<path>	video-processed.mp4	Path for the output video file (used when sink is video)
--sink	-S	video | terminal	video	Where to send the rendered output
--scale	-s	<uint>	1	Scale multiplier applied to each character cell
--density	-d	<uint>	max for mode	Number of characters in the luminance ramp (min 2, max depends on mode)
--loop	-l	<uint>	1	Number of times to loop playback
--japanese	-j	flag	—	Use Japanese katakana characters instead of ASCII

Supported Formats

Input: any container format supported by ffmpeg (e.g. .mp4, .mkv, .avi, .mov, .webm). The path is passed directly to ffmpeg with no extension validation.

Output: the video sink encodes with libx264 + yuv420p, so the output container must be H.264-compatible (e.g. .mp4, .mkv, .mov). Containers that do not support H.264 (e.g. .webm) will fail.

Demo

ASCII mode

example-ascii.mp4

Katakana mode (-j)

example-j.mp4

Examples

Convert a video to ASCII art and save it:

asciyx -i input.mp4 -o output.mp4

Preview in the terminal with 2x scale and katakana mode:

asciyx -i input.mp4 --sink terminal --scale 2 --japanese

Reduce the character density ramp:

asciyx -i input.mp4 --density 10