Terminal Cinema

Terminal Cinema turns your terminal into a tiny theater.

Run one command, pick a film, and watch it stream as a colorful PETSCII-style mosaic with sound. No app store, no browser tab, no setup flow. Just a terminal, a film list, and the glow of ASCII frames.

npx terminalcinema

By Bario Entertainment System

Terminal Cinema is brought to you by Bario Entertainment System.

Bario Entertainment System is the onchain entertainment layer of Base: a culture and product ecosystem for players, creators, collectors, games, digital cartridges, AI experiments, and community-owned worlds. BAES keeps exploring what entertainment can become when it is built in public, owned by its participants, and shared across the internet.

Terminal Cinema is one of those experiments: classic and culture-defining films reimagined for the command line. The terminal becomes the theater.

How It Works

Open Terminal and run:

npx terminalcinema

You will see the $BAES intro, then a film selector. Use the number keys or arrow keys to choose a film. Terminal Cinema pulls from the live BAES film catalog, with a small built-in fallback list if the catalog is temporarily unreachable.

Controls

• 1-9 selects a film from the menu
• up/down moves through the menu
• enter starts the selected film
• q quits
• Ctrl+C quits

Direct Play

If you already know the film slug, you can jump straight in:

npx terminalcinema ethereum
npx terminalcinema metropolis

You can also play a public YouTube URL directly:

npx terminalcinema play <youtube-url>

Options

npx terminalcinema --mute
npx terminalcinema --fps auto
npx terminalcinema --fps 16
npx terminalcinema --palette c64
npx terminalcinema --duration 45 --hold

• --mute disables audio
• --fps <number|auto> changes the frame rate. auto picks a higher default on smaller terminals and backs off on larger ones
• --palette <video|c64> switches the color style
• --duration <secs> stops after a fixed number of seconds
• --hold keeps the final frame on screen until a keypress
• --no-intro skips the $BAES intro

Notes

The first run may download the small playback tools Terminal Cinema needs. On mainstream macOS, Windows, and Linux desktops, Terminal Cinema fetches a native yt-dlp binary automatically, so Python is not required.

If you are on an uncommon platform that does not have a native yt-dlp release, Terminal Cinema falls back to the Python-based yt-dlp build, which needs Python 3.10+.