AsciiStudio

by vitalsoft

A desktop Java application for converting images and videos to ASCII art — with plain text, colour-rendered, and compact binary colour modes.

Features

• Image → ASCII — convert any image to plain or colour ASCII art

  • Three output modes: plain text, colour render (Java2D per-char RGB), colour HTML
  • Density presets: Detailed (70 chars), Simple, Blocks, Hex, Binary, or fully custom
  • Smart autofill of cols/rows/font size from image dimensions
  • Export as .txt, .html, or rendered PNG/JPG image
  • Copy plain/HTML text to clipboard

• Video → ASCII — extract and convert video frames via FFmpeg

  • Three frame storage modes: plain .txt, colour .acf (compact binary, ~40× smaller than HTML), colour .html
  • Per-directory meta.properties storing fps, cols, rows, font size, density, audio source
  • Optional audio extraction (MP3 sidecar)
  • Autofill of all conversion parameters from probed video dimensions

• ASCII Player — play back any ASCII video frame directory

  • Seekbar, play/pause/stop, frame step, timestamp display
  • Loads stored font size from metadata automatically
  • Supports all three frame modes (plain, HTML, ACF)

• Export ASCII Video — renders ASCII frames to a real MP4

  • Pipes rendered frames directly to FFmpeg stdin as raw BGR24 — no intermediate temp files
  • Muxes in extracted audio if present
  • Full progress with phase labels (Rendering / Muxing / Done)

Requirements

• Java 21+
• FFmpeg in PATH (for video features)

Running

java -jar AsciiStudio.jar

Building from source

bash build.sh
java -jar out/AsciiStudio.jar

ACF Format

The .acf (ASCII Color Frame) format is a compact binary format for colour ASCII frames:

Header (16 bytes):
  [0..1]  magic 0x4143 ('AC')
  [2]     version 0x01
  [3]     flags (reserved)
  [4..5]  cols (uint16 BE)
  [6..7]  rows (uint16 BE)
  [8..9]  fontSize (uint16 BE)
  [10..15] reserved

Cell data: cols × rows × 4 bytes
  [0] char index into density string (uint8)
  [1] R (uint8)
  [2] G (uint8)
  [3] B (uint8)

A 200×112 colour frame is ~87 KB in ACF vs ~3.5 MB as HTML spans.

License

MIT