I've been working hard lately on making my own Image->ANSI and Video->ANSI converters for fun.

I've put together my first ANSI movie clip: the first 60 seconds of Star Wars. Feel free to hit my BBS and check it out. It's in the Externals section, under "ANSI Movies."

Also, there are two "resolutions" depending on how you configure your terminal. If you connect at 80x24, you'll see that version. If you use SyncTerm's 132x60, though, you'll get an animation with much more detail.

The big question mark is how well these play over telnet. My tests at home have blown me away. They are playing with much less latency than I thought I would experience. Your mileage may vary, but PLEASE let me know!

Guardian of Forever BBS is: guardian.synchro.net


--Josh

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BiC -=- http://breakintochat.com -=- bbs wiki and blog

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þ Synchronet

Re: ANSI movies
By: Kirkman to All on Fri May 13 2016 12:30:31

I've been working hard lately on making my own Image->ANSI and Video->ANSI converters for fun.

I've put together my first ANSI movie clip: the first 60 seconds of Star Wars. Feel free to hit my BBS and check it out. It's in the Externals section, under "ANSI Movies."

The big question mark is how well these play over telnet. My tests at home have blown me away. They are playing with much less latency than I thought I would experience. Your mileage may vary, but PLEASE let me know!

I checked it out. Looks pretty cool. The animation was decent, although it seemed to take longer than 60 seconds to play for me (I didn't time it though).

Nightfox

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þ Synchronet þ Digital Distortion: digitaldistortionbbs.com

Re: ANSI movies
By: Nightfox to Kirkman on Fri May 13 2016 06:58 pm

I checked it out. Looks pretty cool. The animation was decent, although it seemed to take longer than 60 seconds to play for me (I didn't time it though).

Yeah, right now it's just a giant ANSI dump with no attempt at timing. If the connection between our machines is fast, it can take less than 60 seconds.

I haven't written anything special in Synchronet JS for it yet, but I'll definitely try to develop something nicer than just dumping an 8 meg ANSI file to the console. :)

So far all my work has been on the conversion side.

--Josh

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BiC -=- http://breakintochat.com -=- bbs wiki and blog

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þ Synchronet

Kirkman wrote to All <=-

I've been working hard lately on making my own Image->ANSI and
Video->ANSI converters for fun.

I've put together my first ANSI movie clip: the first 60 seconds of
Star Wars. Feel free to hit my BBS and check it out. It's in the
Externals section, under "ANSI Movies."

Cool, sounds interesting! :) Will have to check out your results. :)




... Casserole is just another word for leftovers.
--- MultiMail/Win32 v0.49
þ Synchronet þ Freeway BBS in Bendigo, Australia.

Re: Re: ANSI movies
By: Vk3jed to Kirkman on Sat May 14 2016 10:32 am

I've put together my first ANSI movie clip: the first 60 seconds of
Star Wars. Feel free to hit my BBS and check it out. It's in the
Externals section, under "ANSI Movies."

Cool, sounds interesting! :) Will have to check out your results. :)

Connect any time! guardian.synchro.net


--Josh

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BiC -=- http://breakintochat.com -=- bbs wiki and blog

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þ Synchronet

Re: ANSI movies
By: Kirkman to Nightfox on Fri May 13 2016 21:12:32

I checked it out. Looks pretty cool. The animation was decent,
although it seemed to take longer than 60 seconds to play for me (I
didn't time it though).

Yeah, right now it's just a giant ANSI dump with no attempt at timing. If the connection between our machines is fast, it can take less than 60 seconds.

I haven't written anything special in Synchronet JS for it yet, but I'll definitely try to develop something nicer than just dumping an 8 meg ANSI file to the console. :)

So far all my work has been on the conversion side.

Well I think it looks pretty good so far.

Nightfox

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þ Synchronet þ Digital Distortion: digitaldistortionbbs.com

Kirkman wrote to Vk3jed <=-

Connect any time! guardian.synchro.net

Will do. :)


... You can tell a real programmer by the keyboard dents in his face.
--- MultiMail/Win32 v0.49
þ Synchronet þ Freeway BBS in Bendigo, Australia.

Re: ANSI movies
By: Kirkman to All on Fri May 13 2016 12:30:31

The big question mark is how well these play over telnet. My tests at home have blown me away. They are playing with much less latency than I thought I would experience. Your mileage may vary, but PLEASE let me know!

I am watching the star wars clip right now and I've got to say I'm incredibly impressed. I mean that about the ANSI as well as the code that you're using to display the movies. Are those rendered clips? It almost looks like they've got to be.
As far as the latency and everything with the code that's displaying things, everything looks pretty good to me, though there is a bit of speed difference when you're going from screens that are only updating a portion of the display to screens that are totally full with so much moving and changing content. As the screen fills up, the display slows down. I don't think that there's anything clogging up the bandwidth on the LAN here, so my guess is that it's not that...
Eager to hear more about this! :)

-D/K

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Borg Burgers: We do it our way; your way is irrelevant.
þ Synchronet þ Tinfoil Tetrahedron BBS telnet://tinfoil.synchro.net

Re: ANSI movies
By: Kirkman to All on Fri May 13 2016 12:30:31

I am watching the star wars clip right now and I've got to say I'm incredibly impressed. I mean that about the ANSI as well as the code that you're using to display the movies. Are those rendered clips? It almost looks like they've got to be.

Thanks! Yes, this demo uses pre-converted clips.

Originally I tried some other converters and python utilities, but I felt like they were all geared for modern command lines with 256 colors. I wanted to do something that stuck to the 8/16 color restrictions of BBS ANSI, and that also made use of shaded blocks to create color blends. I intended to do conversion on demand, but right now my conversion is not quite fast enough for that. The more I thought about, pre-conversion made more sense. I'm not setting up a livecam, so might as well render everything ahead of time and save processor power.

Libcaca is very fast, but I haven't yet been able to get it do exactly what I want, though it probably can. Unfortunately I can't get its Python bindings to work on either of the Macs in my house, so I've been stuck playing with it in a Debian virtual machine.

As far as the latency and everything with the code that's displaying things, everything looks pretty good to me, though there is a bit of speed difference when you're going from screens that are only updating a portion of the display to screens that are totally full with so much moving and changing content.

Definitely true. When I get some time, I'm going to see what it would be like if I exported frames or chunks of animation (instead of the complete movie) and used some BBS-side javascript to control timing and repainting similar to what I did in previous animation demos. I'd like to think I could optimize it and make it more fluid, but there's also a good chance that it would in fact turn out slower.

Eager to hear more about this! :)

I hope to do a proper write-up soon on my blog. My Python code is an evolving mess, but I'll probably post it as-is because people have been asking to see it.

--Josh


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BiC -=- http://breakintochat.com -=- bbs wiki and blog

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þ Synchronet

I'm still fooling around with making these ANSI movies as I get time. I revised several of my previous clips, and I added added some new ones: one from a Pixar short called "La luna" and two from "The Force Awakens."

Check them out over telnet: guardian.synchro.net

--Josh

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BiC -=- http://breakintochat.com -=- bbs wiki and blog

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þ Synchronet