Onna - A real-time video player / streamer for the terminal

Features

• Support for as many video formats as your gstreamer installation supports
• Supports any terminal that supports ANSI escape sequences for cursor movement and color
  • Truecolor and ANSI 256 color
• Real-time video playing / streaming with audio
• Frame dropping when the renderer gets out of sync

Previews

✅ Bad Apple (click to view)

✅ 女の子になりたい (I wanna be a girl) (click to view)

✅ 可愛くてごめん (Sorry for being too cute) (mafumafu cover) (click to view)

Installation

Installation requires gstreamer for your platform.

After you install gstreamer, you can compile and install by cloning the repository and running cargo install --path .

Alternatively, you can run RUSTFLAGS="-C target-cpu=native" cargo install --profile=release-lto --path . to enable architecture-specific optimizations

FAQ

• Q: Why the hell would you want this?
  • A: You can use it to quickly preview videos in the terminal. Otherwise, it's mostly just for fun and it looks cool.
• Q: How is it so fast?
  • A: It's mostly gstreamer being fast, but also the renderer only renders what changes between frames and optimizes escape sequence output. Also it's fast due to making the buffer on stdout quite massive.
• Q: Why is it being slow?
  • A: Skill issue 🚀️. But seriously, if you're having performance issues, use a faster terminal emulator like alacritty. That terminal emulator is ridiculously fast and is perfect for onna.
• Q: Can it play Bad Apple?
  • A: Yes, and with no dropped frames at a 319x77 terminal resolution with xterm on my machine.
• Q: Can it run DOOM?
  • A: It currently doesn't allow user interaction, so it can't play games, but it can watch DOOM gameplay.
• Q: Where does the name come from?
  • A: onna (女) in Japanese translates to girl. I named it this after a video I used for testing, 女の子になりたい (I wanna be a girl) by まふまふ (MafuMafu). This was the first video I thought of other than Bad Apple and it proved to be an amazing video for testing because it has lots of changing colors, lots of different edge cases, and because I could actually tolerate watching the video over 20 times in a single day.
• Q: Why does kitty crash when I resize the window after running onna in kitty mode.
  • A: This is a known kitty bug with images. Try building kitty from source. If it still crashes, it's not my fault.
• Q: When's sixel support coming?
  • A: Soon™️
• Q: Why do you need so many questions in an FAQ?
  • A: Because people asked me a bunch of questions. Why else?

Changelog

• Version 0.2.0
  • Refactored the entire codebase to make the code make more sense
  • Optimizations :3
    • When a stride has the same color as the stride before it don't print the color's escape sequence
    • When a stride directly follows another, don't print the cursor moving escape
  • Added background mode, which writes images as space characters with a background color
  • Added experimental kitty mode which uses the kitty image protocol
  • Applied gamma correction in ascii mode
  • Dark pixels will no longer occasionally become way too bright for no apparent reason
  • The dropped frame counter will no longer appear in random places when interrupted with ctrl + c
  • The dropped frame counter will no longer be written to standard error when interrupted with ctrl + c
  • Anime girls will no longer try to break the fourth wall and escape the confinement of the user's screen