aniterm

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  anime openings and videos in your terminal

Watch anime openings (or any video) directly in your terminal. High-performance C++ — OpenCV decoding, CLAHE + edge-adaptive sharpening, halfblock ▀ 24-bit truecolor rendering.

install

dependencies

# Ubuntu / Debian
sudo apt install libopencv-dev cmake build-essential ffmpeg

# Arch Linux
sudo pacman -S opencv cmake base-devel ffmpeg

# macOS
brew install opencv cmake ffmpeg

For YouTube support, install yt-dlp:

pip install yt-dlp

build

git clone https://github.com/cheese-cakee/aniterm
cd aniterm
make
# binary → build/aniterm

Or with CMake directly:

mkdir build && cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
make -j$(nproc)

usage

# play a local video
./build/aniterm video.mp4

# play a YouTube URL (needs yt-dlp)
./build/aniterm "https://youtube.com/watch?v=NbdM922nITE"

# queue multiple videos
./build/aniterm op1.mp4 op2.mp4

# no audio
./build/aniterm video.mp4 --no-audio

# custom fps / quality
./build/aniterm video.mp4 --fps 30 --contrast 1.3 --gamma 0.85

controls

Type a command and press enter during playback:

command	action
/p	pause / resume
/q	quit
/r	replay current video
/add <file>	add video to queue
/menu	show queue
/h	show help

options

--fps <n>            target fps (0 = source fps)
--no-audio           disable audio playback
--contrast <n>       contrast multiplier  (default: 1.2)
--brightness <n>     brightness offset    (default: 0.0)
--gamma <n>          gamma correction     (default: 0.9)
--no-clahe           disable CLAHE enhancement
--no-sharpen         disable edge sharpening
--dither <0|1|2>     0=none 1=floyd-steinberg 2=atkinson
--max-cols <n>       cap terminal columns
--max-rows <n>       cap terminal rows
-h, --help           show help
-v, --version        show version

how it works

1. OpenCV VideoCapture decodes frames natively — no ffmpeg pipe overhead
2. Each frame is preprocessed: CLAHE contrast enhancement on the L channel (LAB colorspace), then Sobel edge detection drives an adaptive sharpening blend
3. Frames are rendered as halfblock characters (▀) with 24-bit truecolor — top pixel = fg color, bottom pixel = bg color — doubling effective vertical resolution
4. A background decoder thread feeds a lock-free FrameQueue (cap 32); the render thread paces output to PTS timestamps via std::chrono::steady_clock
5. ffplay plays audio in a child process; SIGSTOP/SIGCONT pause/resume it in sync with the render loop

tips

• Zoom out in your terminal (Ctrl+−) for more pixels on screen
• Pixel art and 8-bit videos look especially crisp
• JJK openings look insane:

  ./build/aniterm "https://youtube.com/watch?v=NbdM922nITE"

license

MIT