Convert video files to compressed terminal ANSI streams for playback.

Inspired by Simon Willison, who was in turn inspired by Darren Burns.

Warning: vibe-coded

It takes a video file, extracts frames with ffmpeg, converts each frame to ANSI escape sequences with randomized pixel ordering (anti-tearing effect), and compresses the stream with zstd.

ffmpeg, pv, zstd

# macOS
brew install ffmpeg pv zstd

# Ubuntu/Debian
sudo apt install ffmpeg pv zstd

Python dependencies are managed with uv (see script header).

Convert a video to an ANSI stream:

uv run vidcat.py path/to/video.mp4 --width 80 --output video.zst

Warning big width means big output file.

vidcat prints playback instructions at the end of the conversion.

MIT.

If you really want this code. But I don't know why you would.