LINUX TRICKS : How to play videos in the terminal

The terminal is indisputably the most used application for Linux users. You can do almost everything with just a terminal: from chatting, browsing the internet to playing music ... and of course, you can also play videos in the Linux terminal. To play video in the terminal, you need the mplayer package. I believe mplayer is in the respiratory of all the Linux distro so installing it is a piece of cake. If you use Arch Linux, the installing command will be:

 sudo pacman -S mplayer  

If you use Ubuntu or other Debian-based distro, the command to install mplayer will be:

 sudo apt-get install mplayer  

Now, to watch videos in the terminal, you just need to open the terminal and run this command:

 mplayer -vo caca /path/to/the/video  

If you just need to watch in black and white mode, then the command will be:

 mplayer -vo aa /path/to/the/video  

Note: unfortunately, the video quality is not really good, you will only see the video being played in ASII mode.