About AsciiTube

AsciiTube draws video as live ASCII art: every frame becomes a grid of characters, chosen by brightness and coloured by the picture, in your browser, as fast as the video plays.

How it works

YouTube links (desktop Chrome)

Paste a YouTube link and the page shows YouTube’s official player, uncovered, with its own controls, captions, ads and fullscreen. The ASCII view beside it is drawn from that player: Chrome’s Element Capture shares just the player’s box of this tab with the page, which draws each new frame as ASCII on your graphics card.

Chrome asks to share the tab every visit and shows a sharing bar while it is on. Stop it there, or with “Stop sharing” on the page; the player keeps playing.
Whatever the player shows is drawn, including YouTube’s own controls while your pointer is over it.
This needs desktop Chrome. Other browsers play the open films below.

The open films (every browser)

Two of the Blender Foundation’s open movies play straight away, with no prompt, as ASCII drawn from our own copy of the film.

The Chrome extension

The AsciiTube extension redraws all of youtube.com as ASCII, on YouTube’s own pages and player, with no share prompt. It is not in the Chrome Web Store yet.

Film credits

Big Buck Bunny (2008): © Blender Foundation | www.bigbuckbunny.org. Licensed under CC BY 3.0. Re-encoded (480p, H.264) and drawn as ASCII; no other changes.
Sintel (2010): © Blender Foundation | durian.blender.org. Licensed under CC BY 3.0. Re-encoded (480p, H.264) and drawn as ASCII; no other changes.

AsciiTube is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by YouTube or Google. YouTube is a trademark of Google LLC.