I saw a recent post from Simon Willison where he discussed the python library rich-pixels, written by Darren Burns.

Basically, rich-pixels renders using a Unicode lower half block after setting the color to convert an image.

I have a background in video, so after seeing this, I immediately wondered if I could get it to convert an MP4 into the same format in the terminal.

Vibe coded it up in about 15 minutes or so. For now, all it does is direct playback of the MP4 in the terminal. It does this by using FFmpeg to extract the frames, convert them using rich-pixels, and then play back at the specified frames per second. Next steps will probably be to allow exporting as another MP4 or possibly converting to a GIF. Something like that, but that's all for the future.