[Guide] Changing your boot animation.

[Guest BritishBob]

Right, there is a very good topic on changing your splash scree, however it doesn't go into too much detail about creating/flashing your boot animation. This topic is being set up, to pull resources together, so we have a complete step by step guide to creating and flashing your very own boot animation.

Please note this guide is still working progress..

If and mistakes of correction need to be made please post.

The Basics

What is the boot animation?

The boot animation is the image after the green android man, when you boot up your phone. It is normally animated where as the splash image is a still image.

Guide to changing you splash image

The bootanimation and its components are in a .zip file called bootanimation.zip, and located in the "/system/media/" part of your phones memory.

Most boot animations contain a two folders and a text file. The two folders will contain the images used for the loading image and the loop that follows and the text image contains some code telling the phone which folder to play, and how many times to play it.

desc.txt

This is the file contained within the bootanimation.zip, it contains the information your phone need to correctly display and play your boot animation.

The file has a fairly simple format, however it can be confusing and damaging if you get this wrong.

The code inside represents the width, height, frame rate (FPS), file location and number of times to loop the series of images. A breakdown of this information can be found bellow.

Here is an example of the desc.txt

This desc.txt file contains this code,:

Display in notepad:

480 264 15 p 1 0 animation p 0 0 loop

[Width][Height][FPS][Play][Once][No Pause][Images in folder animation][Play][Infinitely][No Pause][Images in folder loop]

The 480 and 264 are the width and height of your images.

The 15 after them is the frame rate, or frames per second.

p 1 means play 1 time. If it was p 30 it would play 30 times and if it was p 0 it will loop infinitely.

0 is the pause, in frames, after it has finished displaying the images. So if it was 15, there would be a pause of 15 frames, or one second as the fps is 15.

animation is the folder from which the images will be displayed. All info up to the previous p is related to this folder.

This is then repeated for any other folder. You can have any number of folders, but they will all play at the same frame rate. So to increase/decrease the speed of an animation you need to decrease/increase the number of frames respectivly.

Folder structures

This has been metioned before, however

Edited March 16, 2011 by BritishBob

[Guest Nickman1200]

Right, there is a very good topic on changing your splash scree, however it doesn't go into too much detail about creating/flashing your boot animation. This topic is being set up, to pull resources together, so we have a complete step by step guide to creating and flashing your very own boot animation.

Please note this guide is still working progress. Will continue work tomorrow.

The Basics

What is the boot animation?

The boot animation is the image after the green android man, when you boot up your phone. It is normally animated where as the splash image is a still image.

Guide to changing you splash image

The bootanimation and its components are in a .zip file called bootanimation.zip, and located in the "/system/media/" part of your phones memory.

Most boot animations contain a two folders and a text file. The two folders will contain the images used for the loading image and the loop that follows.

Explanation of desc.txt:

Both parts have to use the same frame rate, so if you need one part to go slower, you'll have to create some extra frames.

This is how the desc.txt file works:

320 480 15 Width, height, frame rate

p 1 0 foldername Play 1 time, then pause for 0 frames

p 2 30 otherfolder Play 2 times, pause 30 frames after each loop

p 0 0 andanother Play infinite times, no pause between loops

The "p" is a separator, because it actually ignores line feeds and carriage returns. You can name the folders whatever you want and use as many as you want, and you don't have to loop anything if you don't want to. Note that if your frame rate is "15", then for a 2-second pause you'd use "30" like I did in the example above. You don't have to use the width and height of the screen as your width and height. You can use smaller dimensions and it will fill the rest of the space with black, or you can use larger dimensions but it will crop to only show the center of the animation.

Always make sure your ZIP is created in "store" mode, meaning that it has no compression. And make sure you delete any hidden files inside the ZIP, like "Thumbs.db" from Windows or ".AppleDouble" from a Mac.

[Guest wbaw]

This command will turn a video into a series of png files for the bootanimation.zip you can also add some extra options (crop, scale, reduce framerate, reduce colours) to stop it from being too big.

ffmpeg -i video.avi -f image2 ./android/%3d.png

then to create the zip file...

zip -0 -r bootanimation.zip desc.txt android

don't do infinite loops or the phone never boots, have to be careful with that, i messed one up, maybe there is a way around it. try to make it last about 60-90 seconds & not much bigger than about 12mb. If it's too short then you get a black screen until the phone finishes booting, if it's too big then it slows down the boot & it might not keep up with the frame rate.

Edited March 9, 2011 by wbaw