Comment by Maursault

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

For sixels to be displayed, the terminal must have support for them, and most terminals don't support sixels, like Windows Terminal. xterm has some support, but only 16 colors. But xterm is otherwise an exceptionally feature-poor terminal. I don't think anyone uses xterm unless there is no other option.

While sixels are a very old standard, lack of significant adoption and a code base that is notoriously buggy means that more often than not, the ability to display sixels just isn't there, and on the rare occasion that it is, artifacts are extremely common.

ASCII, otoh, is supported by all terminals. Now, granted, no one wants to watch a video converted into text, but this isn't the point, which is merely a method to display something on the command line, and in the case of ASCII, every command line, every terminal, everywhere and always. mplayer is not dependent on the client, so any remote client can run it remotely from the server. sixel support is the opposite; the client must have support for sixels to be displayed.

> I'm not sure why people expose themselves to something as bad and ugly in this day and age.

> I don't think you understand

> Even abstracting away your incomplete understanding of how sixels work

> I have written lots of sixel code (I've yet to see any of yours)

> tried to explain you the failure in your reasoning

FWIW, all these arguments are ad hominem fallacies indicating invalid and otherwise faulty reasoning.