Pikslate

simple cli app that pixelates and draws a given image/video on the terminal.

Building and running

after successfully cloning and loading the project you can run the following gradle task to build binaries.

./gradlew installDist

this will generate an executable at Pikslate/build/install/Pikslate/bin then you can just do

./Pikslate --url=/path/to/your/image --height=100 --width=100

Note

make sure to zoom out as much as possible in your terminal. also, the program is tested with only .png, .jpg, and .jpeg files. (see /images folder for samples)

Video rendering support (Experimental ⚠️)

rendering video is supported now experimentally. you will need ffmpeg installed and set up correctly. it creates a folder called /frames in the current folder, so you might need to clean it up if you already have one. using 200 for the width and 100 height is recommended. see the video preview here

./Pikslate --url=/path/to/your/video/location/samplevideo.mp4 --width=200 --height=100

Preview

pepe_love.png napoleon.jpg The_GNU_logo.png hard_smile.jpg

Resolution

you can optionally --height or --width args. but this is limited by the number of characters you can put in your terminal.

Accuracy

I have tried my best to make the getDistance() function as accurate as possible with the help of Stackoverflow and Chat-GPT. but it is still very hard because Mosaic by default supports a few ANSI bash colors. see implementation here.

Extending and overriding is impossible since the Colors class is private by default. in the future I will (hopefully) fork it and add colors for better images.

Algorithms

I have quickly hacked up things that I could find in Stackoverflow, old blogs, and GPT. after experimenting with many algorithms, I have found the implementation in getDominantColor() function heavily affects the color selection process. so better ideas are appreciated.

Performance

seems like it performs worse in detailed images and better with images that are mono-chromed or contain fewer colors.