Rust script for baking (or pre-rendering) videos to text using libcaca, and then playing them. No sound.

In my rough testing, this showed to be ~5 times more efficient in cpu usage than mpv --vo=caca (this was NOT a waste of time !! yay)

However, baked text files often weigh 3-5 times more than the original video file, depending on compression.

ffmpeg
libcaca (this script uses img2txt specifically)

Build once with cargo build --release then run ./target/release/cacabake video.mp4 to create the video.baked file, and ./target/release/cacabake video.baked to display it. Arguments :

• -l : Play on loop;
• -a : Any key exits playback;
• -q : Quiet, no output other than video.

If -a is not defined, press q to leave playback.

Videos are baked to the size of the terminal that the command is run in. The video will be stretched to fit, so videos should match the aspect ratio of the terminal to look correct.