First of all, this is blog post #1234, so I decided to make a very simple one with mplayer, the video drivers aalib and libcaca.

The commands:

mplayer -vo aa:driver=slang -monitorpixelaspect 0.5 -msglevel all=0 ~/tmp/\#1234.gif
CACA_DRIVER=ncurses mplayer -vo caca -msglevel all=0 ~/tmp/\#1234.gif
mplayer -vo aa -monitorpixelaspect 0.5 -msglevel all=0 ~/tmp/\#1234.gif

The GIF:

My aalib was compiled with slang, if you dont use that, you can use curses. For some reason, I need to specify -monitorpixelaspect 0.5 or aa driver wouldnt render properly and still cant use it within tmux. -msglevel to prevent any messages ruining the output.

libcaca is much easier, just CACA_DRIVER environment variable is enough to play in terminal. Without it, itd be like the third command, a new window in X pops up to play the GIF.

If you want, you can use -loop 0 to have infinite loop, a GIF screensaver?