image display (particularly animated GIFs) without X11

Great idea. Some suggestions from search "framebuffer animated gif":

I do actually use search engines before posting and I had found that. When I tried omxplayer it did nothing. Well it printed a line of text, but no images, no error messages, and it doesn't seem to have a verbose mode. The SimpleMC (where MC seems to be Media Center) there seems to be overkill.

I intend to try the zgv tool mentioned by the other respondent, but have not had the time yet.

Elijah

------ remembers a time before google

Try 'fbi' - no, I'm not kidding.

I thought that was just a still image viewer. Animated GIFs are a must have. Does fbi/fim do animations?

Elijah

------ initial sources point to 'no'

AFAIK, most image viewers which handle gifs work with animated gifs - but I could be wrong.

Well, I couldn't have guessed from your post, nor from your other reply that you even fully read it. So suck it.

There are two standards for GIFs, "GIF87a" and "GIF89a", the latter allows more control of how multiple images are displayed.

I've installed fim now, and no, it did not animate my test GIF. Instead it only displayed the first frame, as is typical of image viewers that don't do animated GIFs. (For example "feh".)

Elijah

------ otherwise fim looks like a good program

Is there a trick to getting zgv to work with a Raspberry? I could not find it as a pre-built package, only xzgv, which as the name implies needs X11. I grabbed the source and compiled it, but all I get is:

svgalib: Cannot find EGA or VGA graphics device.

Here:

Someone ("rpdom") replies:

That is not surprising as the Pi does not have a PC style VGA or EGA video hardware.

Would compiling it for SDL help? Reading about SDL on Pi implies there are some restrictions:

Having gotten a Pi with no networking, I'm finding sneakernet with modern high-dependency-count packages kind of tedious.

Has anyone here done this? Animated GIFs outside of X11?

Elijah

------ why couldn't that guy have published a guide?

I just googled a little bit and don't if you tried those:

Somewhere in these postings someone also suggested to convert the .gif to a video using ffmpg...

I recognise that name from somewhere ;)

On the Pi? Not yet. On a Linux PC? Yes. mplayer works with the -vo fbdev option. The Pi has fbdev framebuffer support. Perhaps that will work? It'll probably need to install a heck of a lot of dependencies though...

That's a crazy scheme I have not seen before: it's a python script to make a shell script (or cat'able file) with escape sequences to display an image as low resolution color block art. It's like AAlib but without the steroids.

I've already got gifsicle installed. That is one of my standard animated GIF create / edit tools. I can use that to explode to individual (unoptimized) GIF frames. From there I know how to create videos with mencoder, if I want to. (But I don't have either mplayer/mencoder or ffmpeg installed, now, on the Pi.)

At this point I'm thinking: fim can display still images easily, maybe I can script it to display single frames images fast enough that it looks like an animated GIF. In X11, I use feh for that purpose, it has subsecond precision on the -D delay option. In fim, one of the scripting options might let me do it.

Elijah

------ FbiStuffGif.cpp has nothing to indicate animation is in the works