Doing networked video ASCII art in Python

Today we’ll see how to send an ASCII art-styled webcam video stream over the network using Python!

A few months ago, I came across this video by Micode (in French) where the young youtuber presented his 24h-project on how to transform the stream from his webcam into animated ASCII art — so instead of a normal video stream, you get a sequence of images only composed of characters, like this:

I really liked the idea and I decided to reproduce it; then, I took it one step further and added a little server/client sockets logic so I could send my webcam stream to my other computer ;)

ASCII art: using characters to draw images

What is ASCII art?

ASCII art is old, but it’s still amazing and quite trendy in the geek world. It’s about displaying images that are not composed of pixels but of ASCII characters, in other words composed of plain old text characters. What you depict can be more or less complex, it can be just a word (where letters are made of letters, yay!), a simple geometric figure or even a pretty…