This is a sketched project to demonstrate the FFMpeg API for playing videos. It just consumes an arbitrary video file and plays it on the console. I recommend to use xterm or rxvt as it's rendering is really fast, compared to other terminal emulators like the gnome-terminal.

• ffmpeg (latest git version)
  • libavcodec
  • libavformat
  • libswscale

You will probably need to compile the latest version of ffmpeg yourself. For Ubuntu you can find a good guide here.

Be sure you build ffmpeg with --enable-shared as otherwise you will not be able to link to the ffmpeg libraries. Also will also have to add /usr/local/lib to your library path, for e.g.

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib

or by adding /usr/local/lib to your /etc/ld.so.conf and run ldconfig

make
./asciiplayer <video>

• A really well written tutorial on the FFMpeg API can be found here. Though it's sligtly out of date, it shows in a very detailed fashion, how to write a fully functional video player in under 1000 lines of C code, using FFMpeg and SDL.

• The official FFMpeg Documention