Reblog If Your Name Isn't Amanda.

I had a breakthrough yesterday that I've been fervently working on. With what I know about image compression and terminals I was able to implement image and animation display in terminals with color. I'll show a few examples and then explain the significance (I can't show the animation right now because I can't record it at the moment).

Note: These images were automatically optimized not manually, better quality is possible these are samples

The reason this matters is we now have a way to transport graphics in a very optimized way in which we only have to store the indexed colors and the positional data for the colors (which we have a novel method of optimizing) notably you only have to send the indexed colors once for an animation or stream of images. This provides us the ability to render graphics with no GUI so with far less overhead.

TLDR: We have an entirely new way to send and receive images/animations/streamed sequences

For the more technically interested read on

This uses the Python Curses wrapper, unicode block elements and Pillow to achieve this. The limitations are loose but input images will automatically be posterized to handle the 255 color limit of Curses (a little fuzzy on if there are ways around this beyond the fg/bg doubling idea I'm thinking qbout, I'll look into it soon) and your image needs to be a width and height that can be displayed within your particular terminal setup ex: a 32x32px image needs 32 lines and 32 columns.

To accommodate this for PierMesh we can use the ShrinkRay optimizations.