on the subject of GIF animations, they're still the best method for doing very compact animations / demos when few colors are needs. in my case i needed to produce some image scan pattern animations for online docs and what i ended up with after many iterations of screen recording software, codecs and compressors was:

screen-record using a free lossless codec eg http://lags.leetcode.net/codec.html

i used Virtualdub which can produce and AVI, but also an animated GIF. then compress the result using http://www.lcdf.org/gifsicle/

result is extremely tiny filesizes for animations that can be embedded in any web page. hopefully this saves someone a lot of sleuthing work.