Watch Movies in Your Linux Terminal Window

Linux console is something really special :: we can watch videos and we can also listen to radio with it.

It may sound strange, but you may watch videos without GUI. And MPlayer will be your assistant. MPlayer is a powerful multimedia player for GNU Linux.

In terminal the video appears in ASCII code format. The video output is little bit clear in case of Cartoon videos because it consists of less details while on the other hand the HD videos or movie trailers etc.. may not be clear but anyways its FUN to try playing videos on terminal.

You may ask what do we need that for? Well, the first reason is to show Linux capabilities, and then, you never know what you might need. So, here we go.

• The first step i am gonna do is install Mplayer and FBI image viewer(for displaying image in terminal)

yum install mplayer fbi

Then to actually watch video in terminal use the following syntax, replacing the File name of your video.

mplayer -vo caca MovieName.mp4

The “caca” command is actually the color text driver– you could also use ” -vo aa ” instead for black & white.

The video output will be somewhat like this :

Download Youtube Videos from Terminal in Fedora Linux

Shocked!! Yeah guys we can download not only videos from YOUTUBE but also from DAILYMOTION, METACAFE and many more using Terminal in Fedora. Just follow the steps given below :

We will use the tool called “Youtube-dl” which will help us download the video. Youtube-dl is a python script which also supports video downloading from metacafe, dailymotion etc. This tool sure can download videos from youtube but from other video sharing websites try it yourself.

First, let’s install the youtube-dl. It is available in default Fedora repository, as a root user or access type:

sudo yum install youtube-dl

After successfully installing youtube-dl, the syntax to download the video is:

youtube-dl youtube_link

I am going to download Fast and Furious 6 official trailor. I will just copy the link, open the terminal and type:

youtube-dl http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKi5XoeTN0k

Some shells might have problem and won’t work without the code so add the quotes or restart your PC.

youtube-dl "youtube_link"

The video will be successfully downloaded in my HOME directory. You can download as many videos as you want at the same time using terminal tabs or multiple terminals.