Pls: How to make an animated gif fully download before beginning to play??

[Bob Haroche]

I created a rather large animated gif which appears at
www.sonic.net/bharoche/onpoint. Because it's large I specified in my HTML a
low src image to simply hold its place until, I thought, the full animated
gif downloaded and was ready to play.

Instead, I find that the low src image loads almost instantaneously and then
the animated gif starts loading and playing, and "chokes" in the middle of
the animation while playing (because it's still downloading).

I imagine there's a simple work around to get the image to not play at all
until it's fully downloaded but I'm stumped.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, especially with an email copy. Thank
you!

[Copernicusser]

A really really easy way to fix that problem is make a layer that covers
the large image, the once the page below it is loaded you hide that
layer. What you could also do is table the graphic and hope to god that
they all come out at the same time so it'll be synched.
On a side not, you can't use DHTML to do something like that unless you
have a buttload of animated gifs under your belt because DHTML doesn't
really do that effect that he has, unless of course you want to limit
your audience to only IE5 which I think can do a blur filter, but then
you'd have to do some extra coding so that it works out the way he
wants.
Or you could use flash which would be the easiest by far with no coding
at all.

[Jason Parker]

On Tue, 17 Aug 1999 20:14:26 -0700, "Bob Haroche" <bhar...@usa.net>
wrote:

Hi Bob,

Well, mate after a bit of a think I reckon you have 2 choices or
though some other clever git may prove me wrong ;)

Firstly, you could simply scrap the gif animation and do the whole
thing in DHTML which would I think would reduce the download time and
gives you more control over the animation cycle as it can be
constructed through timelines. Dreamweaver and Golive have good
support in creating DHTML web pages.........

Then second way I thought of was to have a blank first page that
simply preloads the gif animation first then moves onto the index page
with the animation on it. I know this will cause a little delay but
you could place a "loading intro......." statement on the page or
something else...................

Hope this has been of some use :)

Jason Parker
webm...@cncc.co.uk

[Peter Hughes]

Bob Haroche wrote:

> I created a rather large animated gif which appears at
> www.sonic.net/bharoche/onpoint. Because it's large I specified in my HTML a
> low src image to simply hold its place until, I thought, the full animated
> gif downloaded and was ready to play.
>

A less reliable but perhaps simpler method is to specify a lengthy time delay
for the first frame.

Good luck

[Bob Haroche]

Yes, I finally tried that and after considerable playing with download
times, including slowing my modem down to 19bps, I was able to "beat the
clock" or so I hope. Even at slower download speeds, the first few frames
are delayed enough so that the remainder of the gif is all downloaded by the
time the later frames appear. Maybe all my viewers will be on ISDN
anyway...:)

Thanks for the tip.