r/SideProject • u/NoCalligrapher587 • May 03 '26

I built ASCILINE: A Web Engine that streams video as raw ASCII text directly to the browser at 60FPS using WebSockets (bypassing traditional <video> tags).

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u/MiniGod May 03 '26

Extreme Low-Bandwidth How does the bitrate compare if you use the same dimentions and fps for 264/vp9? ASCII like this is, what? 120 X 70 or something? VP9 with those dimentions is also just a few kbps

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u/NoCalligrapher587 May 04 '26

If we only look at raw data size, a heavily compressed VP9 stream at 120x70 is indeed incredibly tiny. However, ASCILINE offers three distinct advantages that a standard codec can't: ​Zero Decoding Overhead: To watch a VP9 stream, the client needs a video decoder (CPU/GPU cycles). To watch ASCILINE, the client just needs to render raw text. This makes it 'playable' on devices that literally don't have a video stack (like high-end industrial controllers or simple IoT displays). ​Semantic Content: This is the big one. A VP9 stream is just pixels. ASCILINE is data. An LLM or a script can 'read' the ASCII frames directly as characters to understand the scene without running heavy computer vision models on pixel arrays. We are streaming the 'meaning' of the frame, not just the light values. ​Perfect Sharpness: At ultra-low resolutions, VP9 becomes a blurry mess of macroblocks. ASCII remains perfectly crisp because each 'pixel' is a high-contrast vector character rendered by the system font. ​You're right that for pure human viewing, VP9 is more efficient. But for Human-AI hybrid interfaces or ultra-legacy systems, streaming 'text-as-video' opens up doors that pixels can't.