This reminds me of libcaca [1], which anyone interested in this should check out. It's integrated in various tools, including ffmpeg, mpv, and of course VLC (Sam Hocevar, who wrote libcaca, was also a key VLC contributor at its beginnings).<p>The biggest difference I see (apart from the used programing language) is that libcaca outputs <i>colored</i> ascii art.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libcaca" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libcaca</a>