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I've seen multiple tutorials on it, but none of them are very easy. They all involve multiple scripts and ppas (not that there's anything inherently wrong with that).

This is an issue I've been following closely for many years but I'm just so surprised that it still isn't supported natively.

So where does the difficulty lie in natively being able to set a GIF as a background? Or is it rather due to lack of demand, than difficulty?

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  • I tried one and the animation is not 'playing' (for lack of a better word). Wonder why..
    – Parto
    Oct 7, 2014 at 19:08

1 Answer 1

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Animated GIF has much worse compression-to-quality ratio than video file. Using animated GIF where a video could be used instead is discouraged. With the onset of HTML5 and video support in Web, animated GIFS should be forgotten totally.

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  • ...unless we speak of really short (a second or so) sequence. But setting such a jerky thing on your desktop is a bad idea. Oct 7, 2014 at 18:57
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    Actually, that's exactly what I was thinking (short sequences). Here are two examples that I would love to set as a background: i.imgur.com/tL01ibd.jpg (wrong extension, I didn't upload it) and i.imgur.com/vgkNe5N.gif I think those would be WONDERFUL to set as a BG. I got them from here: reddit.com/r/Cinemagraphs/top
    – MALON
    Oct 7, 2014 at 18:59
  • why not convert it to video file first? avconv -i bunny.gif -o bunny.webm works wonders. Oct 7, 2014 at 19:02
  • I did try what you said and put it in my Pictures folder, but the Appearance window doesn't seem to recognize that file type, won't show up. 2ndly, my question isn't about how to do it, but why the lack of support? My guess is due to filetype difficulty, as I remember smart phones did not support animated gifs for quite some time, so I'm curious as to where the difficulty actually lies.
    – MALON
    Oct 7, 2014 at 19:09

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