[RockerC]

animated gifs at such a scale will be HUGE and IMO a no go for skins. There is a reason why video compression has been invented for this kind of animations. It might probably be better to code those animated backgrounds up with python - so having a static background with timer triggered gif overlays (depending on type of animation ofc)

Would it not actually be better to add native support for looped video background playback for those type of backdrop videos, like leechguy's patch here

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=157585

At least for such full screen video playback as backdrop loops in skins, as then you can leave them in same original video format and quality.

That way XBMC would also support real video backdrops too, which might be better for some scenarios than animated images.


http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=157585

The MultiImage Control is meant for slideshows (e.g. looping through fanart). I don't think that it is particularly well suited for displaying approx. 25~30 different images/second. That would indeed be a bit of a resource problem.

A video on the otherhand that is decoded by the GPU is much lighter. I ripped a video from youtube as a 30 frames per second 1080p H.264 video. It uses only 3.1 MB for a movie of 12 seconds.

I recorded a little video which shows the current status: