Pixels

Rust Terminal Camera Viewer

A high-performance terminal-based live camera viewer written in Rust. It uses Ratatui for rendering, v4l for Linux camera capture.

Inspired by the series "Doctor Who"

Matrix effect in terminal

Black and white effect

ASCII effect

Features

• Multiple Render Modes:
  • Half-block mode: Uses Unicode half-block ▀ characters for high-resolution color display.
  • ASCII mode: Maps camera feed to ASCII characters while retaining color.
  • Matrix mode: Maps camera feed to ASCII Matrix move style.
• Real-time Filters: Apply various color filters (Grayscale, Sepia, Invert, Vaporwave, etc.).
• Bilinear Sampling: Smooth interpolation (Anti-aliasing) for better image quality.
• Screenshots: Save the current frame as both an ANSI-encoded text file (preserving terminal colors) and a PNG image.
• Performance: Parallel YUV to RGB decoding and rendering using Rayon.
• Clean UI: Minimalist overlay with status information and a built-in help menu.

Prerequisites

On Linux, you need libv4l-dev and fonts installed:

# Ubuntu/Debian
sudo apt update
sudo apt install libv4l-dev
sudo apt install fonts-noto-mono fonts-noto-cjk fonts-jetbrains-mono

or 

#Arch Linux
sudo pacman -Syu
sudo pacman -S libv4l v4l-utils noto-fonts noto-fonts-cjk ttf-jetbrains-mono

Installation & Usage

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/gofmanaa/pixels.git
   cd pixels

2. Run the application:

   # Using default device (/dev/video0)
   cargo run --release
   
   # Specifying a different device
   cargo run --release -- --device /dev/video1

Keyboard Controls

Key	Action
q	Quit application
a	Cycle Render Mode (Half-block/ASCII/Matrix)
s	Toggle Bilinear Sampling (Anti-aliasing)
p	Save Screenshot (ANSI & PNG)
Space	Toggle Pause/Live feed
c	Toggle Stats Overlay
h	Toggle Help Menu
1..0	Switch between 10 different Color Filters

Screenshots

Press p to save the current frame. Files are named frame_{timestamp}.ansi and frame_{timestamp}.png.

• ANSI files can be viewed with cat or less -R.
• PNG files are standard images.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.