ffmpeg and mplayer support aalib and/or libcaca, so you can watch your favorite movie in ascii art, if you wish so (you can find lot of examples on youtube, though I couldn't fine one worth sharing)
I'm sure there's a cleaner way to do this, but this'll take input in the form of the "stretched" ASCII art and double up the characters. My fixed-width font is half as wide as tall, so it works out.
To read from a file "filename":
print("".join([a+a for a in open("filename").read()]).replace('\n\n','\n'))
To read from stdin:
import sys
print("".join([a+a for a in sys.stdin.read()]).replace('\n\n','\n'))
11 comments
[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 40.4 ms ] threadThere's also a demoscene competition where entries can only use text-mode art, TMDC [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libcaca [2] http://tmdc.scene.org/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5kPMdYIbvI
Pouet: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=14015 Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmly5dpEpvc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAlib
To read from a file "filename":
print("".join([a+a for a in open("filename").read()]).replace('\n\n','\n'))
To read from stdin:
import sys
print("".join([a+a for a in sys.stdin.read()]).replace('\n\n','\n'))
Here I use Unicode 9.0 and True Color support to render images as text using Python: https://github.com/daleroberts/tv