With friends using VLC on their linux box and unaware of the beauty of libaa/libcaca, I'd type:

    vlc --vout caca videofilename.ext

and then look at them being scared/curious/amazed in that order!

Hey, cool. Here's how to do that with `mpv` on macOS:

    $ brew install mpv --with-libcaca
    $ mpv --vo=caca --really-quiet videofilename.ext

asciiquarium and pipes, too.

I just discovered asciiworld. It can show you a worldmap with day/night shading, geodesic lines to IPs and satellites overhead. Amazing!