zfogg / ascii-chat

🎥🗣 video chat in your terminal 💻🔠

ascii-chat

ASCII video chat.

Probably the first command line video chat progam.

It just prints ASCII, so it works on your rxvt-unicode in OpenBox, a Putty SSH session, and even iTerm on OSX.
It even works in an initial UNIX login shell, i.e. the login shell that runs 'startx'.

Eventually it will support 3+ simultaneous people, 'google-hangouts' style, and sound via PulseAudio or something.

Dependencies

• Most people: apt-get install clang libopencv-dev libjpeg-dev
• ArchLinux masterrace: pacman -S clang opencv libjpeg-turbo
• MacOS: brew install opencv@2 jpeg findutils
  • cp .macos.env .env
  • source .env

NOTE: I recommend using direnv with a .envrc file and sourcing the .env file from there

Build and run

• Clone this repo onto a computer with a webcam.
• Install the dependencies.
• run make.
• run ./bin/server -p 9001 in one terminal, and then
• run ./bin/client -p 9001 -a 127.0.0.1 in another.

NOTE: run ./bin/server -h to see options

TODO

• Client should continuously attempt to reconnect
• Client program should accept URL arguments, as well as IP addresses like it does now
• Colorize ASCII output
• Refactor image processing algorithms
• Client should gracefully handle frame width > term width
• Client should gracefully handle term resize event
• Rewrite entire thing in Rust!
• Compile to WASM/WASI.