I did alot of testing with this.
A 6 second gif (spliced into it's .png images and packaged as prints) with about 60 frames can give you a relatively clean animation.
The downside to this, is that with those 60 frames, there are also 60 more icons you have to package with the individual slides.
Therefore, the file download for joining the server would be a slow 120~.
In order to cycle through the images on a print brick, I just used relays and the setprint event.