[How to] Change the boot screen animation on Android

Smartphones are getting smarter day-by-day with cool new features. Still the best part of any Smartphone is its support for personalization. Android allows you to personalize almost anything and everything on your device. Boot screen animation is no exception. If you are bored with the default boot screen animation on your Android device, you can change it to the one you like. Here is a short tutorial to create new animations or use your favorite video as a boot screen animation. Android boot animation is stored as a zip file (uncompressed) containing the sequence of images used for the animation and a text file containing the meta-information.

 

Steps to create boot screen animation

• Preparing the image sequence. Create the animation using multimedia software like Flash. Turn the animation into a sequence of images and name them as “boot_0001.png”, “boot_0002.png”, etc. Flash has the capability to generate image sequence for the animation. To use a video sequence as animation, extract the image sequence from the scene using tools like FFmpeg for windows.
• Place the images in two directories – part1, part2. The sequence copied inside part1 will be played only once where the one in part2 will be played on a loop until the booting is complete. (This is the commonly used configuration and can be altered via the meta data file)
• Preparing the meta data. Create a text file and name it as “desc.txt”. This file contains two or more lines of information.
  • First line contains three numbers - width, height and the frames per second. Ex: 480 800 32
  • All the lines except the first one will start with the letter “p” indicating that it is a part of the animation. The line contains three items – count (number of times this part is repeated), pause (number of ms to pause after the last frame of this part), and the path to the directory. Ex: p 1 0 part1. Sample description file is shown in the screenshot above.
• Packaging & installing the animation. Now that the images and meta-info file are ready, we need to package them into a zip file named “bootanimation.zip”. Note: There must be no compression. Once the zip file is ready, push the file to /data/local/. “adb push bootanimation.zip /data/local/.”. Reboot your device to see the new animation.

-- Varun

[via @xda-developers]