This project represents a simplistic terminal video player. The concept sprang from a simple thought: "If I can convert an image into a matrix of characters, displaying it, then rendering a video shouldn't be a problem".
Due to font constraints and complexity related to color abstraction, the initial step involves parsing the video into its fundamental components: the frames. Each frame undergoes conversion into a grayscale image, resizing it to a fixed size. This process causes some overhead, so, for the sake of speed, we save the intermediary grayscale resized video into a file.
Upon saving the file, we proceed to read it. Each pixel constitutes an unsigned 8-bit integer ranging from 0 to 255. Our task is to map these values from pixel density to characters. While exploring online, I stumbled upon a blog post detailing how to emulate a gray gradient with characters.
The initial attempt yielded promising results but presented a scrolling effect reminiscent of old movies.
Hence, my immediate consideration was to display one frame at a time and clear the screen after each frame for smooth transition. However, this approach resulted in screen flickering.
Delving deeper, I explored crates and stumbled upon crossterm. While analyzing its source code, I noticed a hidden macro called 'csi'.
It's a simple wrapper around the string "\x1B[", but why? Apparently there exists some special character sequences, called ANSI escape codes, whis codes send specific instructions to the terminal about video options. There was a particular code that intrigued me.
Sending to the terminal the code "\x1b[0;0f" causes it to return to the initial line and column.
Implementing this adjustment produced a better outcome but transitioned too rapidly. Thus, the final component required was to introduce a delay to mimic a given frames-per-second (FPS). Relying on measurements from this site, I established a ~45 milliseconds timer, resulting in the final rendition.
