[Reader-list] Live ASCII Streaming
Drazen Pantic
drazen at location1.org
Mon May 21 13:31:25 IST 2001
Live ASCII Streaming of Video
1. Introduction
The Internet, with its architecture, infrastructure and media
characteristics, is a challenging arena for video experimentation and
dissemination. The concept of moving images, sound and text over
decentralized TCP/IP network lead to the development of Web, streaming
technologies and recently pear_to_pear (P2P) standards. Due to basic
characteristics of Internet traffic and communication, net streaming
is - and always was - different from one_to_many full broadcast
quality distribution channels. And regardless of strong commercial
tendency to bring Internet streaming to - in terms of known business
and conceptual commercial models - safe heavens of "network
television", audio/video presentation on the Internet still remains
something different.
One of the experiments in using Internet technology in representing
video material is ASCII streaming, in which illusion of the motion is
brought to experience by moving ASCII text based images, within the
fixed raster matrix on the screen. ASCII streaming does not try to
bring Internet multimedia streaming close to "broadcast quality", but
goes into totally different direction: representing video as the
sequence of moving images composed of ASCII letters.
1.1. History
From the early presence of personal computers and low resolution
character based printers, one of the very first applications was
printing pictures and photos as ASCII characters, presenting visual
images as the matrix of letters. With the development of high quality
printers, ASCII pictures almost disappeared.
1.1.2. ASCII Art Ensemble
Recent effort of bringing the sensibility and esthetics of absolute
technologies into realm of current practices and technological
development is work of ASCII Art Ensemble, [1].
ASCII Art Ensemble has taken the task of converting seminal pieces of
film and video into the ASCII movies: the sequence of text segments -
characters representations of the movie frames. They have developed
software for converting video into ASCII files as well as the first
ASCII player. Player was developed as Open Source Java Applet.
Similar work on creating the Java applet that allows the user to
display an animation of ASCII text is available on [2], although
author does not provide source code, and require a his name and URL to
appear in the accompanied Web page.
1.1.3 HasciiCam
Major step forward towards live ASCII streaming has been made by
Jaromol and the group around dyne.org, [3]. Their product,
Hasciicam..."makes it possible to have live ASCII video on the web. It
captures video from a tv card and renders it into ASCII, formatting
the output into an html page with a refresh tag or in a live ASCII
window or in a simple text file as well, giving the possibility to
anybody that has a bttv card, a linux box and a cheap modem line to
show a live ASCII-video feed that can be browsable without any need
for plugin, java etc. Hasciicam's source code is released under the
Gnu Public License." ...(taken from [3]).
2. Live ASCII Streaming Implementation
The following (ASCII) scheme shows the flowchart of the
implemented live streaming:
|video feed
|
v
+------------|-------------+
| Linux box with: |
| - bttv video card |
| - hasciicam software |
-------------|--------------
|
V
,-----------.
,-' ASCII file `-.
( (10-15 frames/sec))
`-. ,-'
`-----------'
|
V
+-------------+
| Web server |
+-------------+
|
V
,-------------.
,-' ASCII Java `-.
( player )
`-. ,-'
`-------------'
2.1. Encoding
Encoding (converting analog video feed into the sequence of ASCII
files) has been done on a Linux box with video card and software
(bttv) package that enables digitizing and importing of video material
through composite/S-video input.
HasciiCam package decomposes video in the sequences of frames and
converts frames into corresponding ASCII file. An example of one such
file taken from the live feed from live cam in front of Location One,
could look like [4].
2.2. Java Player
ASCII output from the Hasciicam is then sent to the http server that
is to deliver content to Web users. But, st it is obvious from [4],
the output is not directly suitable for presentation as the ASCII
video feed. Few additional features were needed:
* more realistic user experience and clear representation of the ASCII
feed in a form of a movie;
* platform independence, so that this relatively light video
presentation could be played on variety of computers and computing
devices;
In order to accomplish those goals we have developed a small, open
source Java player for live ASCII feed, ASCIIMATOR. Player has been
developed starting from ASCII Art Ensemble Asciimator player, but
different nature of live streaming has forced substantial changes of
Java code. The player is available as open source and free software,
under Gnu Public License, [5]
The demonstration of the live feed from the cam in front of the
Location One is available on [6].
2.3. Portability and Playing on Handheld Devices
The player software and described practice has been developed having
in mind handheld devices (Palmtops, WAB phones, DoCoMO cells in Japan
etc) that can handle Java code. ASCII streaming on such devices is
fully justified by the low resolution screens and generally modest
computing power, not sufficient to decompress highly compressed
movies.
[1] http://www.ljudmila.org/~vuk/ascii/aae.html
[2] http://www.ericharshbarger.com/java/
[3] http://ascii.dyne.org/
[4] http://204.181.65.31/ascii/aka
[5] http://location1.org/documentation/Asciimator.java
[6] http://204.181.65.31/ascii/
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