just as a bit of a personal quest, and as a relatively inexperienced linux user, i am trying to get video to play using mplayer with either aa or caca doing the video output all through a putty session on my windows desktop. the box it's running on is running debian, and i've tried everything google has to offer on configurations of mplayer, libcaca, aalib, and sdl.. yet i still cant get the damn thing to do it. each and every time i get the same error: "Error opening/initializing the selected video_out (-vo) device."
now im not sure this has anything to do with the way i have the output libraries set up, because if i do 'mplayer -vo wtf??? filename' i still see the same thing. nothing. can someone explain why this error persists despite my efforts?
i thank you for any advice in advance.

I'm not sure what you want to do. Putty is an encrypted (ssh) text mode terminal program, you need at least a graphic terminal for this concept to work. Use a Windows media player over Samba if you need to play files from your Linux server.

aalib and libcaca are specifically designed to render the video in ascii text through a terminal window.

Post the output of mplayer -vo help. That will contain all the available video drivers that can be used at the present time. On your own, you could also try each one in turn.

it doesnt show either driver as available. any idea how i make them so?

libcaca and the other isn't actually a driver, its a set of libraries. The actual driver will be called something else. The output of mplayer -vo help really would be useful.

sorry, forgot...

MPlayer 1.0pre7-3.3.5 (C) 2000-2005 MPlayer Team
CPU: Intel Pentium III Katmai/Pentium III Xeon Tanner (Family: 6, Stepping: 2)
Detected cache-line size is 32 bytes
CPUflags: MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 0 3DNow2: 0 SSE: 1 SSE2: 0
Compiled for x86 CPU with extensions: MMX MMX2 SSE


Available video output drivers:
fbdev Framebuffer Device
fbdev2 Framebuffer Device
vesa VESA VBE 2.0 video output
cvidix console VIDIX
null Null video output
mpegpes Mpeg-PES to DVB card
yuv4mpeg yuv4mpeg output for mjpegtools
png PNG file
jpeg JPEG file
tga Targa output
pnm PPM/PGM/PGMYUV file
md5sum md5sum of each frame

Well cvidix looks suspicious, you might also want to try the fbdev's. If that doesn't work, just try everything...

Something just occured to me. I've used mplayer on a windows box, and there the default video out is win32 I think. Try doing -vo win32, and if that doesn't work see if you can find documentation for available windows video drivers that mplayer can use.

no sorry, maybe i didnt make myself clear enough. mplayer will be running on the linux machine, using a text based video output library to output content to a terminal. just so as an example i used a putty session on a windows box.