termplay

Name by the awesome @tbodt

Are you a terminal fanboy like me?
Sure, but do you ever watch YouTube? In your terminal?

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termplay is the tool to convert images to ANSI sequences.
But it also supports playing videos...
Written in the systems language Rust, it has some solid performance.

• Multiple modes
  • Sixels: Only supported by a few terminals, like xterm.
  • Unicode halfblock: This is the same as TrueColor below, but uses unicode half-blocks for smaller pixels.
  • TrueColor: Any RGB color, supported by most terminals.
  • 256 color: The closest representation of a color that can be fit within 1 byte. Use this if nothing else works.
• Flexible
  • Change framerate, size and more using command line switches
• Adapting size
  • Automatically scales the image to fit your terminal

Termplay also allows you to control the media, such as zoom in or pause the video.

• Mouse Scroll / +/-: Zoom
• Mouse Drag / W/A/S/D: Pan
• Space: Play/Pause
• Left/Right: Seek
• Up/Down: Volume
• q / Ctrl+C: Quit

(Landscape image from pexels.com)

Using

Image

termplay 2.0.0
jD91mZM2 <me@krake.one>
Play images/videos in your terminal

USAGE:
    termplay [FLAGS] [OPTIONS] <path>

FLAGS:
        --help       Prints help information
    -q, --quiet      Ignores all the nice TUI things for simple image viewing
    -V, --version    Prints version information

OPTIONS:
    -c, --converter <converter>    Decides how the image should be displayed [default: halfblock]  [possible values:
                                   color256, halfblock, sixel, truecolor]
    -h, --height <height>          Sets the height (defaults to the terminal size, or 24)
    -r, --rate <rate>              Sets the framerate [default: 24]
        --ratio <ratio>            Sets the terminal font ratio (only takes effect with some converters)
    -w, --width <width>            Sets the width (defaults to the terminal size, or 80)

ARGS:
    <path>    Specifies the path to the image/video to play

Compiling

Compile time requirements

Rust v1.25 or more is required. See your Rust version with

rustc --version

Update rust with

rustup update stable

Compiling!

Other than that, this project is hosted on crates.io.
So to install you just need to run

cargo install termplay --features bin

(Note: The --features part is a hack because binaries don't allow specifying separate dependencies)

Features

Almost all dependencies are optional and can be disabled!

Default features:

• termion: This is what enables the rich image viewer. Disabling this will disable almost everything.
• gst: Video support, requires gstreamer
• sixel: Support for sixels, requires libsixel

To disable default features, run

cargo install termplay --no-default-features --features "bin,..."

where ... is a comma separated list of features you want to keep.

Nix

Termplay is available with the default features on Nix!

nix-env -iA nixpkgs.termplay

Arch Linux

If you just want to get this running on Arch Linux with the default features, you can use the
AUR Package (unofficial)

Debian / Ubuntu

Example:

sudo apt install libopenal-dev libsndfile1-dev libsixel-dev libgstreamer1.0-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-dev libgstreamer-plugins-bad1.0-dev
cargo install termplay --features bin