Okay, so I got bored at college, and had a play around with some things.. and what I came up with was amazing

First, make sure you have mplayer & LibAA installed:

sudo apt-get install mplayer
sudo apt-get install libaa-bin

Okay, so now here is the cool bit!
(You'll need an AVI video for this... you can download youtube videos from http://www.vixy.net in AVI format)

Once you have an AVI file downloaded and ready to use, you can play the video in ASCII mode using the following command:

mplayer -vo aa xxxxx.avi

Just change xxxxx.avi to your video name .avi

Nice huh?

And if you want to view the video in color, you will need to download and install Caca-Utils:

sudo apt-get install caca-utils

And to paly the video:

mplayer -vo caca xxxxx.avi

Have a look at some of the settings using

mplayer -vo --help

to find how to change the contrast and many other options of the video.

If you have any problems with install or using any of these applications, then please do leave a comment to you, and I will help you as much as I can do.