That would be very convenient. Wouldn't have to deal with ent_setskin or anything. I know shaders could be made to achieve all kinds of things visually, but to be honest, I haven't thought of such a shader.
The animation is this:

I have a tank and I need the tracks -- both wheels and linked tracks themselves -- to animate as the tank moves. Let's say I'd offset the UV to scroll the linked tracks but what about the wheels? they need to rotate and the bigger picture is I'd use the shader in other projects, as well.
Here is the track model:

Btw this is the default 3DSG parallax effect which is faulty, as you can see, but that's a different story...
The linked track (the part that goes on the ground) will have stripes not the way the track goes but across, to suggest the links but the diffuse texture is not ready yet.

+'s and -'s:

- The trick is I want to use bump and parallax as well. How does this get along with the method? Would it work? And would it require that the normal/height mapping textures be of the same format?
+ The texture size is small so the frames would fit into a 512 x 512 or maybe even 256 x 256 texture.
- only a few polys of the model need animated texture so there'd have to be both "dead" and "animated" parts into the same texture (not necessarily a minus but makes the shader more complicated)

I'm far from making my first shader (to say the least). Do you know of one that does what you said?