Launching today
ASCII Player
Watch YouTube, Twitch and TikTok videos as live ASCII art
2 followers
Watch YouTube, Twitch and TikTok videos as live ASCII art
2 followers
A free Chrome extension that redraws the video you're watching out of text characters, live, right in the player. Works on YouTube, Twitch, TikTok and Instagram. GPU-rendered, four character sets, a Matrix digital rain mode, and you can copy any frame as plain text. No account, no tracking: nothing leaves your browser.
Hi Product Hunt! I'm Eldar, and I make small Chrome extensions.
ASCII Player started back in 2020 as a weekend toy: a button on YouTube that redraws the video out of text characters. This year I rewrote it from scratch:
• Rendered on the GPU (WebGL2), so playback stays smooth even with a 4 px font
• Works on YouTube (including Shorts), Twitch, TikTok and Instagram
• Auto contrast, so dark videos still look sharp
• Four character sets: Classic, Detailed, Blocks and Binary
• New this week: Matrix mode, the digital rain from the film. Green falling katakana, with the video glowing through it
• "Copy frame as text" puts the current frame on your clipboard, ready to paste into a chat or a code block
• Alt+A toggles it from the keyboard
It's free, needs no account and sends nothing anywhere: it only runs on those four sites and only stores your settings.
Is it useful? Not really, it's just fun :) Nature footage and music videos look great in Blocks mode. Tell me which video looked best for you, and which site I should support next.
Gallery footage: HikingFex.com (Christian Sommer), CC BY.