p2pvc on HackerShow

Dev tools

terminal video chat

SHOW HN2015

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A Simple terminal-based video chat – renders in ASCII and has audio

Shown by emgram769 on Feb 8, 2015. Click the card to turn it over.

375points

44comments

#31of 2,565 in 2015

Top 2%of 2015 by points

How HN took it

CuriousMostly questions and neutral comments

11 positive, 13 neutral or asking, 0 mixed, 2 critical, out of 26 comments about the project. Thread score +0.35.

Idea: 3 for, 0 againstExecution: 1 for, 2 againstDesign: 1 for, 0 againstPerformance: 1 for, 0 againstPrivacy: 1 for, 0 against

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

Video compression and bitrate concerns
From 3 comments
- It's almost too high fidelity. Wow. One request - what's the bitrate? (I know it's probably possible to measure in 1 line of shell)
  zaroth on HN
- Text is extremely compress-able. Admittedly, this is not common text, and is many "snapshots" of the whole screen, but I believe LZ-based compression would still be extremely…
  SwellJoe on HN
- The text here may compress well, but only because the original video has been "decompressed" into an incredibly inefficient encoding in the first place. If you want to transmit…
  vidarh on HN
Needs port forwarding; NAT blocks connections
From 1 comment
- > p2pvc does not get around NAT, so you may need to port forward. It uses ports 55555 and 55556 for audio and video respectively. Nice use case for IPv6.
  atmosx on HN

Add XMPP/SIP support
From 1 comment
- It would be awesome if it supports XMPP/SIP. And btw is there a image previewer for terminal?
  ledzep2 on HN
Use color blending with block characters for better quality
From 1 comment
- You can go a bit further to get significantly higher color depths using ASCII block characters 176, 177, 178. By using the foreground and background ANSI colors and blending them…
  13 on HN

Bitrate of the stream
From 1 comment
- It's almost too high fidelity. Wow. One request - what's the bitrate? (I know it's probably possible to measure in 1 line of shell)
  zaroth on HN
OpenCV version error fix
From 2 comments
- :( Anyone get the error "VIDIOC_STREAMON: Invalid argument libv4l2: error turning on stream: Invalid argument Can't seem to get it to work trying anything on github etc and want…
  rhgraysonii on HN
- We actually got this error as well and had to update to a newer version of OpenCV. 2.4.10 seemed to fix it
  emgram769 on HN

termchat (billyeh)
From 1 comment
- This is awesome! Wonder how it compares with mine (github.com/billyeh/termchat). Would love to share notes with the maker, since audio was something I did not even consider while…
  bwy on HN
libAA / libcaca
From 2 comments
- While I do find image processing fun too, why not just use libAA?
  outworlder on HN
- Also have a look at: http://aa-project.sourceforge.net/aalib/ http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/libcaca and possibly other clones too. Might help improve the visuals.
  akavel on HN
txtcam, sshcam, jp2a
From 3 comments
- I made something similar to this using a combination of 256 color mode and unicode halftone characters for "dithering" between the foreground/background colors.…
  dhotson on HN
- The audio part is cool! I made a similar project to this (but without sound). https://github.com/kfei/sshcam Which uses SSH connection, 256-colors, Unicode block characters and…
  kfei on HN
- https://csl.name/jp2a/
  13 on HN