Flagship Demo — Console Video Player (libc-free)

• Type: feature
• Status: done
• Owner: Antigravity
• Opened: 2026-06-21
• Relation: Sibling to other flagship demos. Depends on the low-level process spawning and pipe redirection in feature-sys-process-spawning and terminal input in feature-rtl-terminal-raw-mode.

Goal

A terminal-based video player (examples/player/) that spawns an external ffmpeg process, redirects its stdout raw video frames via a pipe, and renders them at 24/30 FPS synchronized to the monotonic system clock.

Specification

• Spawning: Invoke ffmpeg in a pipeline: ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -f image2pipe -pix_fmt rgb24 -vcodec rawvideo -
• Audio: Spawn a sibling processes (like aplay) to handle audio playback in sync.
• Sync & Timing: Read Width * Height * 3 raw RGB24 frames from the pipe. If behind the monotonic timeline, drop frames. If ahead, sleep.
• Controls: Non-blocking key events:
  • Space to pause / resume.
  • q to quit playback.
  • g to toggle rendering quality on-the-fly between pixelized (half-block) and advanced (quadrant-plus-detail) modes.

Log

• 2026-06-21 — Opened.
• 2026-06-21 — Implemented video player with raw pipe reading, monotonic clock syncing, frame skipping, quality/mode toggles (ASCII/half-block/quadrant), and raw terminal input controls. Finished PAL-safe vfork process pipeline execution to avoid stack corruption (commit WIP).