ascii-video

ascii-video is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from StarryCod/cogitum. It costs 17 tokens per session (3,462 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of ascii-video, MIT.

An ASCII video production guide for turning video, audio, images, or generated input into colored character-based animations. ASCII art represents pictures with text characters.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to make terminal-style videos, GIFs, MP4s, image sequences, audio-reactive visualizers, matrix effects, and text or lyric overlays.
Why use it?
It provides a process for creating a deliberate visual concept instead of producing a generic text-effect conversion.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to make terminal-style videos, GIFs, MP4s, image sequences, audio-reactive visualizers, matrix effects, and text or lyric overlays.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/starrycod/cogitum/ascii-video
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add StarryCod/cogitum --skill ascii-video
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/StarryCod/cogitum

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for ascii-video

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/starrycod/cogitum/ascii-video.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/starrycod/cogitum/ascii-video)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/starrycod/cogitum/ascii-video"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/starrycod/cogitum/ascii-video.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 17 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,462 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 1 finding. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin 98% copy Near-identical to another mod in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00017 $0.03462
Opus 5 $0.00009 $0.01731
Sonnet 5 $0.00003 $0.00692
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00346

Measured 7d ago against content hash 1d4f84e0eacc, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ascii-video scanned grade A with 1 finding against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 7d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Runs shell commandslowCapability

Expected in a hook, worth knowing in a rule or an instructions file.

Never `stderr=subprocess.PIPE` with long-running ffmpeg — buffer fills at 64KB and deadlocks. Redirect to file. See `references/troubleshooting.md`.
Origin

This is a copy

98% identical to ascii-video — 7 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

cogitum/data/skills/creative/ascii-video/SKILL.md · 242 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 242 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

ASCII Video Production Pipeline

When to use

Use when users request: ASCII video, text art video, terminal-style video, character art animation, retro text visualization, audio visualizer in ASCII, converting video to ASCII art, matrix-style effects, or any animated ASCII output.

What's inside

Production pipeline for ASCII art video — any format. Converts video/audio/images/generative input into colored ASCII character video output (MP4, GIF, image sequence). Covers: video-to-ASCII conversion, audio-reactive music visualizers, generative ASCII art animations, hybrid video+audio reactive, text/lyrics overlays, real-time terminal rendering.

Creative Standard

This is visual art. ASCII characters are the medium; cinema is the standard.

Before writing a single line of code, articulate the creative concept. What is the mood? What visual story does this tell? What makes THIS project different from every other ASCII video? The user's prompt is a starting point — interpret it with creative ambition, not literal transcription.

First-render excellence is non-negotiable. The output must be visually striking without requiring revision rounds. If something looks generic, flat, or like "AI-generated ASCII art," it is wrong — rethink the creative concept before shipping.

Go beyond the reference vocabulary. The effect catalogs, shader presets, and palette libraries in the references are a starting vocabulary. For every project, combine, modify, and invent new patterns. The catalog is a palette of paints — you write the painting.

Be proactively creative. Extend the skill's vocabulary when the project calls for it. If the references don't have what the vision demands, build it. Include at least one visual moment the user didn't ask for but will appreciate — a transition, an effect, a color choice that elevates the whole piece.

Cohesive aesthetic over technical correctness. All scenes in a video must feel connected by a unifying visual language — shared color temperature, related character palettes, consistent motion vocabulary. A technically correct video where every scene uses a random different effect is an aesthetic failure.

Read the full file on GitHub · 242 lines

Files

What ships with it

9 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 7d ago First seen · 242 lines · 17 tokens per session scan A 1d4f84e0eacc

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ascii-video is a skill published in the GitHub repository StarryCod/cogitum (11 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 17 tokens to every session and 3,462 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (runs shell commands). It is 98% identical to ascii-video, differing in 7 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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