termplay

Name by the awesome @tbodt

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

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)

Ubuntu

Example:

sudo apt install libopenal-dev libsndfile1-dev libsixel-dev gstreamer1.0-dev gstreamer-plugins-base1.0-dev gstreamer1.0-plugins-base gstreamer-plugins-bad1.0-dev gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad
cargo install termplay --features bin