OK, it seems the problem is in the mplayer2 package which does not contain aa (libaa1) support.

I've tried mplayer (the old one, not mplayer2) package and it works!

Here is what I've just done to make it work:

$ sudo apt-get purge smplayer

$ sudo apt-get purge mplayer2 

$ sudo apt-get autoremove 

$ sudo apt-get install mplayer smplayer

This way I've achieved to have mplayer 1.x, in particular 1.1-4.8:

$ mplayer --version

Unknown option on the command line: --version

Error parsing option on the command line: --version

MPlayer 1.1-4.8 (C) 2000-2012 MPlayer Team

(which is the same version as @Sneetsher reported - thank you!)

Now it's working almost the same as before again. I suppose the problem occurred after upgrading to 14.04 somehow, maybe because, if I am not wrong, I had not mplayer installed explicitly, but rather just "shipped-in" as dependency of smplayer (?) - this is my hypothesis so far.

"almost the same as before" means it runs, but it's strangely blinking all the time. Before having all this trouble the picture was bright and clean. However, I've came to this workaround:
http://andrusiv.com/blog/2010/01/08/mplayer-is-superman-of-mediaplayers.html

You have to use the -really-quiet parameter.

You might also want to adjust the pixel aspect ratio to make use of the whole screen with -monitorpixelaspect X parameter where X is a number to play with - try 0.7 or similar.

So my final typical usage of mplayer to render video in ASCII from X is as follows:

xterm -geometry 269x102 -fn 5x7 -e "mplayer -noautosub -really-quiet -monitorpixelaspect 0.9 -vo aa:driver=curses:contrast=35 *"

BTW, to list the fonts available in your system, you might want to run xlsfonts

If you would like to play videos like this in text mode only (single user mode with console only, no X), you would probably appreciate set some smaller console font first, something like this might help:

setfont /usr/share/consolefonts/Uni1-VGA8.psf.gz

Typical usage of mplayer to render video in ASCII from text-only console (no X) is as follows:

defaultfont="/usr/share/consolefonts/Uni2-Fixed16.psf.gz"

font="/usr/share/consolefonts/Uni1-VGA8.psf.gz"

test -e "$font" && setfont "$font" || { echo "ERROR: font "$font" could not be set :(" >&2; exit 1; }

mplayer -noautosub -really-quiet -monitorpixelaspect 1 -vo aa:driver=curses:contrast=35 *

test -e "$defaultfont" && setfont "$defaultfont" || { echo "ERROR: supposed default font "$defaultfont" could not be set, sorry :(" >&2; exit 1; }

You may combine it into one script:

$ cat ~/bin/asciiplay.sh

#!/bin/bash

#play all readable files in current directory with mplayer and render them in ASCII

#crysman (copyleft)2014



#list fonts in X:

#xlsfonts



#list fonts in text-only (TTY) mode:

#ll /usr/share/consolefonts



# we detect text-only mode

textonly=`tty | grep tty | wc -l`



if [ $textonly -ge 1 ]; then

  #Xubuntu 14.04 TTY console default font:

  defaultfont="/usr/share/consolefonts/Uni2-Fixed16.psf.gz"

  #let's set a more appropiate font:

  font="/usr/share/consolefonts/Uni1-VGA8.psf.gz"

  test -e "$font" && setfont "$font" || { echo "ERROR: font "$font" could not be set :(" >&2; exit 1; }

  #play it all

  mplayer -noautosub -really-quiet -monitorpixelaspect 1 -vo aa:driver=curses:contrast=35 *

  #revert to default console font:

  test -e "$defaultfont" && setfont "$defaultfont" || { echo "ERROR: supposed default font "$defaultfont" could not be set, sorry :(" >&2; exit 1; }

else

  #likely usable fonts:

  #font=-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--6-60-75-75-c-40-iso8859-1

  #font=-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--7-50-100-100-c-50-iso8859-1

  font=5x7

  #font=micro

  #geometry optimized for font 5x7 on 1366x768 resolution:

  xterm -geometry 269x102 -fn $font -e "mplayer -noautosub -really-quiet -monitorpixelaspect 0.9 -vo aa:driver=curses:contrast=35 *"

fi;

I've created a launchpad bug regarding to mplayer2 not supporting aa here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mplayer2/+bug/1338000

Happy ASCIIing! ;)

McZ