I encountered an animated GIF, https://static01.nyt.com/science/gifs/Suppl.3.gif (an odd wave propagating over the atmosphere of Venus) . I can view it in X but I'd like to view it in not-X.

I just tested it in mplayer and mplayer displayed it.

In non-X? I get errors, the first set complaining that it can't open the X11 display, the second complaining that it can't initialize the video driver.t

Mplayer is defaulting to an X display

mplayer -vo help should give you a list like this..

vdpau VDPAU with X11
xv X11/Xv
gl_nosw OpenGL no software rendering
x11 X11 ( XImage/Shm )
xover General X11 driver for overlay capable video output drivers
sdl SDL YUV/RGB/BGR renderer (SDL v1.1.7+ only!)
gl OpenGL
gl_tiled X11 (OpenGL) - multiple textures version
dga DGA ( Direct Graphic Access V2.0 )
matrixview MatrixView (OpenGL)
v4l2 V4L2 MPEG Video Decoder Output
directfb Direct Framebuffer Device
dfbmga DirectFB / Matrox G200/G400/G450/G550
null Null video output
mpegpes MPEG-PES to DVB card
png PNG file
jpeg JPEG file
gif89a animated GIF output
mng MNG file


mplayer -vo <insertdisplayhere> filename

try dga, directfb, libcaca (caca.zoy.org/wiki/libcaca)

You could also try mplayer -vm filename (It will try to choose the best driver)

-vo aa
-vo caca
-vo fbdev2

worked for me on animated gifs.

however, the results were... less than desirable.

what also worked:the last one was the only one that gave a good result.