ASCII animations that are viewed in the command-line?

Not really a short video but here is the most famous one: Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.

Open a terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run :

telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

You can play any video as an ascii animation with the caca video driver for mplayer:

sudo apt-get install mplayer2 caca-utils
mplayer -vo caca /path/to/video

This has several output options which work better in X11 but can also work from a real terminal, even over SSH (urgh, it's horrible). It'll also sync sound in there too.

If you don't have any videos to hand, I can help you out. You wouldn't get this from any other guy. I just wanna tell you how I'm feeling. Gotta make you understand...

sudo wget -qO /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl
sudo chmod a+rx /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl

youtube-dl -o- "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ" | mplayer -vo caca -

If you like trains, install sl:

sudo apt-get install sl

Now you can enjoy a beautiful old steam locomotive driving through your terminal as often as you want!

Also try sl with different parameters:

• -a: "accident" - people in the train crying for help
• -l: "little" - a smaller locomotive
• -F: "flying" - antigravity is cool! ;D