What is termtube?

TermTube is a command line tool that lets you watch YouTube videos directly inside your terminal, with the video rendered as colored characters and the audio playing in sync. It works on Windows, Linux, and macOS. There are two rendering styles. The halfblock style uses Unicode half block characters to pack two vertical pixels into each terminal cell, giving a high density, full color result. The ascii style converts each video frame into colored ASCII art using a configurable set of characters ordered from light to dark, so it still preserves the original colors while looking more like classic text art. Audio is streamed alongside the video and kept synchronized using a clock based system that tracks and corrects drift over time. The tool automatically detects your terminal size to fit as much detail as possible without wrapping or scrolling, and it automatically reconnects if YouTube briefly throttles or drops the stream. Since video is rendered using terminal character cells rather than actual pixels, image quality depends heavily on your terminal's font size: a smaller font gives more cells and a sharper picture, while a larger font gives fewer cells and a blockier one. You can also override the automatic sizing with a column count option. Getting started requires no manual installation. You download or clone the project and run a provided script, play.bat on Windows or play.sh on Linux and macOS, which automatically downloads and configures Python, FFmpeg, and other dependencies on first launch. After that you simply paste a YouTube URL and pick a rendering style. There is also a standard installable command line version using pip, which requires FFmpeg and ffplay to already be available on your system. Command line options let you control the output width in columns, target frame rate, rendering style, and the ASCII density ramp used for the ascii mode. Under the hood it relies on yt-dlp to fetch the video, FFmpeg to stream it, and ffplay for audio. TermTube is released under the MIT license.