Watch Movies in Your Linux Terminal Window

Linux console is something really special :: we can watch videos and we can also listen to radio with it.

It may sound strange, but you may watch videos without GUI. And MPlayer will be your assistant. MPlayer is a powerful multimedia player for GNU Linux.

In terminal the video appears in ASCII code format. The video output is little bit clear in case of Cartoon videos because it consists of less details while on the other hand the HD videos or movie trailers etc.. may not be clear but anyways its FUN to try playing videos on terminal.

You may ask what do we need that for? Well, the first reason is to show Linux capabilities, and then, you never know what you might need. So, here we go.

• The first step i am gonna do is install Mplayer and FBI image viewer(for displaying image in terminal)

yum install mplayer fbi

Then to actually watch video in terminal use the following syntax, replacing the File name of your video.

mplayer -vo caca MovieName.mp4

The “caca” command is actually the color text driver– you could also use ” -vo aa ” instead for black & white.

The video output will be somewhat like this :