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ananddass
My friend just learned how to code last week and was already able to make this. I'm impressed by the quality of codecademy
alpb
That's actually quite interesting. I wonder, what is the underlying algorithm? That's amazing for a first-week coder.
iansinke
There's probably a lot of complicated ways of doing this, but to keep it simple you could probably just downscale the image, convert to black and white, and have an array which maps lightness ranges to ascii characters
brettcvz
Looking at the source, looks like he piped it through http://secret-wildwood-1014.herokuapp.com/, which looks like it does basic image to ascii conversions when you give it a url. Not sure if he spun that up, but it's cool in that now the app can be made all in js
coldskull
what would really be cool is if someone creates a service that can turn videos into 'ascii art' videos....that would look beautiful...
brettcvz
Do it! That would be awesome!
jbsilva
Try `mplayer -vo aa <video_file>`
vhf 

  -vo caca <video_file>
to have it in color. :)
qq66
YouTube had this for April Fool's, where you could watch any video in ASCII art.
w00kie
I wrote a program for playing video in ASCII on an OpenVMS console (VT220 orange text serial console) for a university project. I played the Matrix dojo fight scene for the final presentation, it was a big success! :)
rosstafarian
telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

starwars done in ascii ;)

pixelbath
This is amazing. I was expecting an algorithmic conversion of the video, but...just, wow.
[dead] w00kie
I wrote a program for playing video in ASCII on an OpenVMS console (VT220 orange text serial console) for a university project. I played the Matrix dojo fight scene for the final presentation, it was a big success! :)
alpb
Pretty cool. I finally saw a practical use of filepicker.io!
[dead] neeee 

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Edit: Made using toilet[1], in case anyone wants to try.

[1] http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/toilet

MIT_Hacker
I remember making a python script in high school that did this same thing. If only FilePicker had existed then!
chippy
Does it have an API?
girlvinyl
Really fun! Nice implementation of photo to ascii.
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gyaresu
p.p.s jp2a FTW.

and well der. Mplayer with ascii rendering. Pft. Of course. But you knew that right?

crasshopper
I flipped out the first time I saw mplayer ascii rendering. I'm thinking of projecting Rashomon ASCII-version at an art show sometime. Or any classic film with deeply emotional topics, intricate facial expressions, reduced to 7-bit projections.
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jordanthoms
Mplayer has ASCII art output for videos, -vo aa . Can be fun :-)