ascii-colorizer

Rust CLI that converts images and videos into colored ASCII art for terminal display.

Requirements

• A terminal with ANSI color support (TrueColor recommended)
• ffmpeg and ffprobe on PATH for video input

Install

Prebuilt binaries (recommended)

Download the archive for your platform from GitHub Releases, verify the SHA256 checksum, extract it, and place the binary on your PATH.

Platform	Asset name pattern
Windows (x86_64)	ascii-colorizer-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.zip
Linux (x86_64)	ascii-colorizer-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz
Linux (ARM64)	ascii-colorizer-aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz
macOS (Intel)	ascii-colorizer-x86_64-apple-darwin.tar.gz
macOS (Apple Silicon)	ascii-colorizer-aarch64-apple-darwin.tar.gz

Releases are published when a version tag is pushed (for example v0.1.2). See latest release.

Install with Cargo

cargo install --git https://github.com/Cod-e-Codes/ascii-colorizer.git --tag v0.1.2 --locked

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/Cod-e-Codes/ascii-colorizer.git
cd ascii-colorizer
cargo build --release

The binary is at target/release/ascii-colorizer (.exe on Windows).

Usage

Image:

ascii-colorizer --file ./image.png
ascii-colorizer --file ./image.png --width 120 --detailed --color no-color

Video (live playback in terminal):

ascii-colorizer --file ./video.mp4 --type video --fps 12 --width 120 --color truecolor

Video (save to file):

ascii-colorizer --file ./video.mp4 --type video --fps 10 --save output.txt

Notes:

• Video output is streamed frame by frame to avoid loading all frames into memory.
• Saved video output uses a form feed separator between frames.
• Live playback runs in an alternate terminal screen and restores the previous screen on exit.
• Ctrl+C exits video playback cleanly and restores terminal state.

CLI options

Option	Description
-f, --file <FILE>	Input file path
-w, --width <WIDTH>	Output width in characters (default: 100)
--height <HEIGHT>	Optional max output height
--detailed	Use detailed character set
--color <COLOR>	truecolor or no-color
-s, --save <SAVE>	Write output to file
--type <TYPE>	auto, image, or video
--fps <FPS>	Video frame rate (default: 12)

Development

cargo fmt
cargo clippy --all-targets --all-features -- -D warnings
cargo test
cargo build --release

CI runs on every push and pull request to main. Pushing a v*.*.* tag builds release binaries and attaches them to a GitHub Release.

Supported formats

Images: JPEG, PNG, BMP, GIF, TIFF, WebP (via the image crate)

Videos: MP4, MKV, MOV, AVI, WebM, FLV, M4V (decoded through ffmpeg)

License

MIT. See LICENSE.