No, I copied the whole folder from the N900 to my laptop. So yeah, probably better to use a different vid format.

I had some mixed results keeping the background alive. Again, this was done on bash on my laptop and I had to use a binary of the most recent ffmpeg in order for it to work: use overlay.

The mixed results were: Even though all the source images are the same size, some of the animations appeared out of place, as if the original image had been of different size.