MPEG

Animated GIFs were used in my first tries, but at 25 Megs per animation, loading was often slow, and demanding on the browsers. So, I switched to MPEG animations instead, well under 1 Meg each.

It seems all MPEG renderers are not born equal, and the Mozilla plugin system, at least as configured here by default, does not appear to necessarily pick the best one. At the time of this writing, I was running Linux as per SuSE 9.2. These are the results of my quick observations.

• 1   xanim
• 2   plaympeg
• 3   animate
• 4   xine

1   xanim

is very bumpy, to the point the animation looses all its fluidity:



xanim 001.mpg

2   plaympeg

(from the smpeg package) is much better in that respect, yet there is a small delay, observable and unwelcome, before the cycle starts over:



plaympeg >/dev/null -l 001.mpg

3   animate

(from the ImageMagick package) is quite fluid, yet it takes time to initialize and gets too fast after the first loop has completed::



animate 001.mpg

4   xine

is about perfect, yet some doing is needed to silence it up: (Sigh! It does not work anymore under SuSE/Novell 10.2...)



xine >/dev/null 2>&1 --no-logo --no-splash \

--hide-gui --loop 001.mpg

One friend, playing all the time with MS-Windows machines, seemed to insist for downloading the animation first, and then used some off-line tool for looking at it. Someone else told me that animations were not moving at all in her MS-Windows. So I would be tempted to guess that Internet Explorer has its own problems. But I do not know more.