Asciinema CLI 3.0 rewritten in Rust, adds live streaming, upgrades file format (opens in new tab)

Awesome, glad you like it. The next release 0.13.0 will have a 'random_effect' option so you're not forced to handle it via shell function. It also significantly reduces the data being transferred and the CPU usage by adjusting the framerate to a more appropriate 60fps. It should perform much better on low end devices which are typically accessed via SSH such as raspberry pi's.

Very minor and tangential request for future recordings - show the shell prompt and/or put the commentary in shell comments (prefix with "# "). A step closer to IRL.

Speaking of which, an interesting thing to contemplate is if it is worth automating what you did, or if making the videos happens rarely enough that you'd start from scratch with a new manus or other ai session.

> Is there a way you can add something like TTE to tmux or vim as a screen saver

I'm not a big vim user, but anywhere you can run a shell command, you should be able to run TTE. As long as ANSI control sequences are respected, the animation should play. TTE will accept piped text or a file input.

> How do you typically use it?

The most common invocation method is either piped text from some other command or passing a text file via command line arg. It also works as a library and can be imported into existing Python applications to produce animations and animated prompts.

> What was your intent when you first wrote it

A post here on HN featured an animation of the Sneakers terminal decryption effect and I thought, I can do that in Python. I wrote a handful of simple effects and really enjoyed the process of writing effects and upgrading the engine to support new features. The effect requirement -> engine feature loop is very satisfying. So, I keep working on it when I have free time.

> what do you use it for now?

It's really more of a toy, and the delay it causes requires some thought when using it, but I've had people reach out with some interesting use cases. Shell startup / SSH motd is pretty common. It can be imported and used as a library, so you may find it as a splash screen or animated prompts in scripts. A few people have shared examples of using it as an animation tool to create advertisements or background animation for electronic music displays. Framework computers recently tweeted a video of TTE running on boot for one of their laptops.

Eventually, I'd like to fully document the API from an effect writing perspective and produce some tutorials. I won't consider the project 'finished' until that happens. I don't want to abandon it before people are able to write their own effects.

Compiz. Beryl. Compiz Fusion. Unlocks some fun memories.

Also this video has some 6 million views now: https://youtu.be/xC5uEe5OzNQ?si=GOvwOTHV-RVQnxWv . I remember watching it and being awed by the cube effect.

* ... Compiz [...] the thing that got me to ditch Windows for Linux [...] *

I thought that was the role of Enlightenment [1] but I guess I'm just old. :)

[1]: https://www.enlightenment.org/

You can also just upload an MP4 on GitHub. Using GIFs on GitHub is pretty embarrassing.

Webservers require an insignificant amount of CPU time in comparison to any graphical interface.

Modern hardware in conjunction with smart software choices can be very capable, but it's pretty negligent to run a service people depend on with such limited resources.

Sure, not every site needs to run on a highly-available elastic cluster of nodes, but the alternative mindset of actively rejecting this architecture is arguably even more harmful.

A healthy deployment should be able to scale up and down easily, if not automatically. I wouldn't want to be woken up at 3am because prod1 needs a CPU/RAM/disk increase and a reboot, and the users wouldn't like that either.

The CPU usage was single digit (%) with no viewers (but other requests being served) with btop at 100ms, so that's not adding a lot. But thanks!

I was adding more VMs and restarting load balancer. Should be good now.

Another feature of this is that if your primary PC crashes, which happens sometimes especially with some games, your stream doesn’t go down too. This is more important for streams with more viewers and longer runtimes, as restarting the stream drops all the AFK viewers who may still be contributing ad revenue (or just boosting active viewer count which has other flow on benefits too).

You can see this effect in long streamathons/subathons as twitch automatically kills long streams so you’ll see multiday streams get cut up either manually by streamers or automatically by twitch every 24h or so, and the viewer count drops significantly and takes quite some time (many hours) to recover.

YouTube recompresses everything anyway so I found the higher quality you upload the better the result, especially for complex stuff like high-paced gameplay.

And at very high bitrates nvenc quality is just fine. It's mostly at the lower bitrates x264 really shines.

Of course for livestreaming there are different constraints.

Additionally, running on a different computer allows for eg adjusting scenes in OBS or moderating Twitch, without losing focus from the running app/game.

Yeah that makes sense. I was thinking that the two computer setup was also something they did to keep their streaming stuff completely separate from the rest of their life, to not accidentally doxx themselves on-stream and to not accidentally execute malware on the same host they do their email and banking etc on.

Some games have this feature called "streamer mode", where some text that would normally be on screen is removed, like username or party codes. Makes sense for a terminal to do the same for other sensitive data.

It would be nice to censor my username from the prompt without changing my shell prompt.

No idea if it does this already though.

Why would it be satire? Seems like a real use case

Yes, it's right there in the article.

> All this tells me is that the authors are trend chasers rather than solid engineers, which erodes any trust I had in this project.

Eh. I think my takeaway would be more that this is the authors passion / side project that they use to test and learn new languages.