termview

View images, animated GIFs, and videos in your terminal. Audio + keyboard controls included.

tv photo.jpg
tv animation.gif
tv movie.mp4

No terminal? Try the web version → Drop an image / GIF / video, get the same ASCII / block / pixel output, download as PNG / GIF / TXT / ANS.

Install

pip install termview[video]

Video playback also wants ffmpeg for audio. Without it, video plays silently:

brew install ffmpeg              # macOS
apt install ffmpeg               # Debian/Ubuntu

How it picks a renderer

tv auto-detects the best graphics protocol your terminal supports and falls back gracefully. The four paths, in quality order:

Renderer	Used when	Quality
kitty	Kitty, WezTerm, Ghostty (sets $KITTY_WINDOW_ID or $TERM_PROGRAM)	pixel-perfect
iterm2	iTerm2, Warp (sets $TERM_PROGRAM=iTerm.app)	pixel-perfect
sixel	xterm, foot, Windows Terminal, mlterm (queried via DA1)	pixel-perfect
block	everywhere else (universal fallback)	ANSI background fills, one image pixel per cell

The block renderer auto-switches between truecolor (\033[48;2;R;G;Bm) and xterm 256-color with Floyd-Steinberg dithering depending on what your terminal actually supports — macOS Terminal.app gets dithered output, everything else gets full 24-bit.

Force a renderer:

tv photo.jpg --renderer kitty
tv photo.jpg --renderer block --depth 256

Video playback

tv movie.mp4               # plays with audio (if ffmpeg installed)
tv movie.mp4 --no-audio    # silent
tv movie.mp4 --fps 8       # throttle frame rate

Keyboard controls

Key	Action
space	play / pause
← →	seek -5s / +5s
↓ ↑	seek -30s / +30s
, .	previous / next frame (while paused)
m	mute / unmute
+ -	volume up / down
0	restart from beginning
q / esc	quit

Add --no-controls to disable for scripting / asciinema recording.

Cross-terminal notes

Environment	Behavior
tmux	Forces the block renderer. Pixel-protocol passthrough is fragile across tmux versions; --renderer kitty etc. can still be forced if you've enabled allow-passthrough on (tmux 3.4+).
SSH	Forces the block renderer. Inline-image protocols don't survive most SSH chains.
macOS Terminal.app	Auto-detected as 256-color. Floyd-Steinberg dithering kicks in for stills; video uses no-dither for stability and an automatic 12fps cap.
Windows Terminal	Auto-detected via $WT_SESSION, uses sixel.
non-TTY stdout (tv x.png > out)	Video playback refuses. Images write a renderable stream that's only meaningful when re-played to a terminal.

CLI reference

usage: tv [-h] [--renderer NAME] [--depth DEPTH] [--width COLS] [--no-crop]
          [--fps N] [--no-audio] [--no-controls] [--loop] [-v]
          file

rendering:
  --renderer NAME    kitty | iterm2 | sixel | block  (default: auto)
  --depth DEPTH      truecolor | 256                 (default: auto)
  --width COLS       override terminal width
  --no-crop          disable automatic border cropping

video / animation:
  --fps N            limit playback frame rate
  --no-audio         disable audio
  --no-controls      disable keyboard controls
  --loop             loop animated images (default: on)

  -v, --verbose      print detection diagnostics

Library use

from termview import load_image, fit_image, get_renderer, detect_renderer, terminal_size

img = load_image("photo.jpg")
cols, rows = terminal_size()
renderer_type = detect_renderer()
fitted = fit_image(img, cols, rows, renderer_type)
get_renderer(renderer_type).display(fitted)

Video and animation playback have higher-level entry points (stream_video, stream_animation) that bundle the playback loop, audio process management, keyboard input, and terminal state restoration.