How to save mplayer's output when watching in ASCII mode (with aalib)

I was helping out a friend working on a presentation where he wants to show some videos he has taken but converted to ASCII art. I can do that quite easily with mplayer on a Linux box using aalib (-vo aa). But that only plays the movie, transcoding it live. What I would like to do is to convert those videos to ASCII art and save them in files so that they can be played in a loop on some regular video players (be that vlc, wmediaplayer, whatever).

I have played around with mplayer / mencoder trying to dump streams, videos, piping it to fifos, standard output and so on but I just can not seem to find any way of doing this.

Has any of you done this before and if yes, how?

Thanks a lot!

Aalib is incredible. I think the problem is that the mplayer output is in a different window making direct piping difficult. Here are a few routes you could take:

• One option, is to record the entire desktop. This SE link demonstrates a way to record the entire screen using ffmpeg.

Record entire screen from terminal

ffmpeg -f x11grab -s wxga -r 25 -i :0.0 -sameq /tmp/out.mpg

Then, start the video, maximize the window, wait until it stops, and stop the recording. Crop the screen dimensions and time of the screen capture video manually or with a script. The drawback here is that the work flow is greater than the real time of the video playback.

• Recording an xterm is another route, but my xterm display never has the aesthetic beauty of my other settings.

• If you have a tripod, camera, and patience, you could record playback with an analog work flow. Aesthetics go through the roof, but that feels kind of silly.

• You have the most live playback options playing through mplayer so I would suggest setting up a Linux for your friend as the best option for playback. Also, you can loop the video by using the loop switch:
  -loop 0

I also struggle with recording aalib. I would love to know a better way of doing this. If you find out, please share with me.