Hiptext is a fun little research project of Justine Tunney to find new and interesting ways to render images as text, with a lot of help from Serene Han.
You need clang or gcc >=4.7. You also need to install:
sudo apt-get install build-essential libpng12-dev libjpeg-dev \
libfreetype6-dev libgif-dev ragel libavformat-dev libavcodec-dev \
libswscale-dev
sudo ./install-glog.sh
sudo ./install-gflags.sh
sudo ldconfig
make
./hiptext whatever.png
./hiptext whatever.avi
./hiptext --spectrum # Show color spectrum graph
./hiptext --macterm whatever.png # The absolute best (Mac only)
./hiptext --xterm256unicode whatever.png # Best on xterm/gnome-terminal
./hiptext --xterm256 whatever.png # Default
./hiptext --nocolor whatever.png
./hiptext --nocolor --chars=" .oO0" whatever.png