The.Matrix-ASCII Process

I originally started with someone else's DivX copy of The Matrix. The resolution was wrong and the credits were missing so I started over with the DVD. I found that DivX and ASCII images do not mix well so I decided to format the movie for DVD instead.

I extracted the frames from the DVD with MPlayer. MPlayer had a problem with the sound so I extracted the AC3 file on another computer with DVD2AVI.
movie frame

convert segfaulted while trying to convert some of the images from JPEG to PPM. I used convert to crop the borders and Netpbm to convert to PPM.
cropped movie frame

I used aview to convert the frames to text. I modified aview to run xwd as soon as it finished rendering the image and then exit.
ascii frame

I used convert to crop, resize and color the images.
matrix frame

I used the MJPEG Tools to create the MPEG-2 video for the DVD. I followed the DVD Encoding Guide to recode the video to fit on a DVD-R. I ran pulldown on the video so that it would play correctly and dvdauthor to create the VOB files for burning.

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