What it is

A Python tool that converts GIFs and video files into animated ASCII art with color gradient support. Plays in the terminal. Forked from Google's gif-for-cli and modernized.

Why it matters

The original Google project was abandoned and broken on modern Python. Forked it, fixed it, added color gradient support. Nobody asked for it. I just think ASCII art is cool.

How it's built

• Pillow for frame extraction and image processing. Each frame is downsampled to terminal-width resolution.
• Brightness-to-character mapping with a configurable character ramp. Denser characters for darker pixels.
• ANSI color escape codes for 256-color and truecolor terminal output. Maps each pixel's color to the nearest terminal color.
• Frame timing preserved from the source GIF so animations play at the original speed.