Why do animated GIF's stop?

Forum: User Feedback
Topic: Why do animated GIF's stop?
started by: jerekeib

Posted by jerekeib on Feb. 19 2008,00:46

I am running a hard drive install of DSL 2.1
First, why not 3.x ? All later versions don't seem to recognize the on board network card (ASUS Pundit-R) and I am too lazy or stupid to find out why, but that is another issue.

I have been running a web browser that has just a few lines of html which refresh the page every 60 seconds to do just one thing: Display an animated weather radar GIF from the NWS.

This works great, except for the fact that 1 to 10 days go by and the GIF stops animating and stops refreshing. If I close the browser (either Firefox or Opera) and open it again, all is well for a while.

Any ideas as to why or logs/processes to check when this happens?

I would love to not have to open a browser to display the animated GIF, I could run a cron job to wget the gif if some other app could display/reload it.

Thanks to all thoughts in advance....

Posted by curaga on Feb. 19 2008,15:04

There are many apps that can show animated gif's. Zgv comes to mind first,
but I think nearly any image viewer could do it, try xzgv for example.

Posted by curaga on Mar. 01 2008,10:11

Gifview submitted to testing..

Posted by jerekeib on May 07 2008,16:33

Update:

I decided to run a cron job that will wget the animated gif, then let the browser (Opera 8.52) display the gif with the appropriate refresh, timed to match the gif cycle.

I did install cron and wget to newer versions because I needed the feature switches not present in the minimal versions with DSL, plus there were a few glitches with the older versions.

It has been working for over a month now with no problems, and additional features were added due to the script.

Thanks for your help, it is appreciated.