Play videos in the terminal ... simply because you can

Videos in the terminal with mplayer

The Linux terminal, so loved by some and hated by others, allows us to do all kinds of tasks. For most of them there is a tool with a GUI (user interface), but what we do in the terminal, like convert videos to other formats, it can be more "pure" and offer better performance. What we are going to teach you in this article is not for performance or comfort, but simply because we can do it. Is about play videos on terminal.

Logically, if you are thinking of playing 4K videos, stop reading right away. If what you want is to see them as a curiosity, go ahead. Above all, what is explained here will be better for users of MPlayer, a famous open source player, because if we already have it installed we will only have to execute a command to watch the videos in this curious way. We explain how to get it below.

Playback of Youtube home page
Related article:
How to download, convert and play videos from the terminal.

Play videos in terminal with MPlayer

MPlayer is available from the official repositories of many Linux distributions. It can be downloaded from this link, but in systems like Ubuntu the steps to follow would be these:

  1. If we don't have it installed, we install MPlayer with the following command.
sudo apt install mplayer
  1. Now that we have everything we need, we have to play the video with this command:
mplayer -vo caca /ruta/al/archivo

When we press enter, the video will start playing with audio and everything, but the image will be like what you see at the top of this article and below these lines. We will see the playback in a new terminal window, while the first will show playback information. From the first window we can also pause the video with the space bar or stop it altogether with the usual keyboard shortcut, which is Ctrl + C. The difference between playing a video in a GUI player and playing videos in the terminal can be seen in the following image:

Video in the Avengers terminal

The same, right? As we've mentioned, it's more of a curiosity than something really useful, but we do it because we can.


3 comments, leave yours

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  1.   Autopilot said

    You go far enough and you put some popcorn.

  2.   anonymous said

    As is, as the parameter passed to mplayer… .a reverend -vo poo

  3.   qtrit said

    I join to see the movies in colored ascii XDDDDD

    useful I don't know, but the laughs are guaranteed.