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| Boot Animation |
Boot animations are one of the first things that you see after turning on your device. They are in fact just a set of images in the specified PNG format, but they make a ROM seem unique. Sometimes, they are even our favorite part of a particular project. If you are an intermediate Android power user, it’s relatively easy for you to create a boot animation, but you need to have the right tools to do it without editing files manually. It’s a long process and why to choose the manual way when there are plenty of more optimized methods?
Create Your Own Boot Animation
So you want to put the artist inside you at work and create your very own boot animation? It’s so easy even a child can do it, and we are going to show you how.
If you have found a boot animation that is made for higher resolution devices and you have a low resolution one, you can use this method to edit those to fit your device as well.
Requirements:
- A zip/unzip utility like 7-Zip
- Image editor of your choice like PhotoShop, GIMP, Paint.NET, heck even MS Paint will do.
- A plain text editor of your choice. Using Windows Notepad for editing text files that are to be used in Linux is not always a good idea, so use something like Notepad++ instead.
- As much time and creativity as you are willing to put into the task.
- You must know the screen resolution of your device if you don’t know it already. You can find the resolution by searching for your device specifications on Google.
Note: A high resolution device will be able to play a boot animation made for a low resolution device but it will not take up the whole screen, while a high resolution boot animation will not display completely on a low resolution screen device.
Procedure:
- Go through the entire Inside the bootanimation.zip File section of this guide first, if you haven’t already done so.
- Plan how your boot animation will run. This includes how many distinct parts it will have, how long will each part play and what will be the sequence of the parts.
- Make a new folder at any convenient location on your computer, and name it bootanimation.
- In this folder, create a folder for each part of your boot animation, named part0, part1 and so on.
- In the image editor of your choice, make all the image files for each part of your boot animation with the proper dimensions equal to your phone’s screen resolution, and save them in the respective folder for each part, in PNG format. Up to 32 bit PNGs are supported.
- Note: In case you are converting an existing boot animation to fit your phone’s screen, simply extract the images from it and resize each of them to your device’s screen resolution.
- Make sure the images are named in numerical format and in proper sequence, i.e. the images in the first part should start with let’s say 00001.jpg and go on till 00065.jpg, and the images in the second part should then start off with 00045.jpg and go on till – for instance – 00143.jpg.
- Once you have the images for all the parts done and saved with proper names in each folder, create a text file named desc.txt in the main bootanimation folder.
- Open the text file in a text editor and edit it in the format described in detail in the desc.txt filesection above. Do consider that a frame rate higher than 30 fps can give issues on many devices.
- Note: In case you are converting an existing boot animation to fit your phone’s screen, keep everything the same as in the original desc.txt file and change only the resolution.
- Now select everything inside the bootanimationfolder and zip them into a new uncompressed zip archive using your favorite compression utility. Here is the method using 7-zip:
- Select everything inside the bootanimation folder.
- Right-click on any of the selected files/folders and from the 7-zip menu, select ‘Add to archive’.
- Use ‘zip’ as the archive format and ‘Store’ as the compression level, and click OK. This will create a file called bootanimation.zip in the same folder.
That’s it – you have created your own Android boot animation! The only thing left now is to apply it to your device, so let’s get on with it.
Apply a Boot Animation
So you have found a boot animation that you want to install on your phone? Created one of your own and can’t wait to see it in action on your device? All you have to do is copy it at a certain location on your device. There are two locations you can copy it: /data/local and /system/media, and both have their advantages and disadvantages.
Advantages of copying it to /data/local is that you will not require root access for it and it should work for all non-rooted devices without running the risk of changing anything in the /system partition. Furthermore, if a bootanimation.zip file is found in both locations, Android ignores the one found in /system/media and gives priority to the one in /data/local. A disadvantage of this method is that upon a hard reset (also called a full data wipe or a factory reset), the new boot animation will be lost.
Copying the boot animation to /system/media/ is possible only if your device is rooted and you have read+write access to the /system partition. An advantage of this method is that upon a hard reset, the new boot animation will still remain and there will be no need to apply it again. A disadvantage is that it requires ADB or a root level file browser such as Root Explorer or Super Manager.
Had enough of the details? Here’s how to get on with applying the boot animation. We will tell you how to copy the file to any of the above mentioned locations and will use ‘All devices’ for the /data/local path method and ‘Rooted devices only’ for the /system/media path method.
UPDATE: It has been brought to our attention that the following method will not work for some devices running stock ROMs because their manufacturers have made the ridiculous decisions of either using their own proprietary format for their boot animations (we’re talking about you, Samsung!), or choosing a non-standard path for the bootanimation.zip file and removing the ability to override it by copying a new one to /data/local (that would be you, HTC!).
In case of the proprietary format used by Samsung, there is little we can do. However, the HTC devices use the same format but at a different path i.e. /system/customize/resource/ instead of the usual /system/media. This means users with rooted and S-OFF HTC devices can still replace the original one using the following method, by simply changing /system/media to /system/customize/resource/ but those without rooted and S-OFF devices are simply out of luck, as the /data/local method will not work on such phones.
Requirements:
- Android phone or tablet running Android 2.2 Froyo or later. Tested to work on Froyo and Gingerbread; may or may not work on earlier or later versions due to different file locations.
- A root file browser such as Root Explorer or Super Manager.
Note: If you already have ADB installed or if you are comfortable with the command line, you can use it instead. For ADB installation help, see what is ADB and how to install it. We will also provide you with the ADB method below. - The boot animation of your choice in bootanimation.zip name and format.
Note: To check which format is it in, open it using a zip/unzip utility and see its contents. If it contains the files and folders mentioned above in our ‘Inside the bootanimation.zip file’ section, it is the right format. If you see folders amongst which one is called META-INF, it is in recovery flashable format but you can still find the bootanimation.zip file inside the archive in the /system/media folder, and extract that file from the recovery flashable zip file, for using it with this method.
File browser method (Rooted devices only):
- Connect your phone to your computer via USB and mount the storage card for file transfer.
- Copy the bootanimation.zip file that you want to install, to your SD card.
- Unmount USB storage and launch the file browser of your choice on your phone.
- Browse to /system/media, copy the existing bootanimation.zip file from there and paste it somewhere safe on your SD card.
- Browse to the location on the SD card where you copied the new bootanimation.zip and copy it.
- Browse to /data/local and paste the bootanimation.zip file there to override the default system boot animation without replacing it.
OR
Browse to /system/media and paste the bootanimation.zip file there.
If you are using Super Manager, you will have to enable its root function first from the settings. Furthermore, you may need to mount the /system partition as read-write first too upon entering it.
Note: If you had earlier on copied a custom bootanimation.zip file into /data/local, you will also need to delete it or else the new one from /system/media will not be loaded.
ADB method:
- Enable USB debugging on your device in Settings > Applications > Development.
- Connect your device to the computer via USB.
- Launch a command prompt/terminal window on your computer.
- Navigate to the location where you have the bootanimation.zip file saved.
- Rooted/Unrooted devices:Enter these commands:
adb pull /data/local/bootanimation.zip c:\ adb push bootanimation.zip /data/local/
OR
Rooted devices only: Enter these commands:adb pull /system/media/bootanimation.zip c:\ adb remount adb push bootanimation.zip /system/media/
Whichever method you used, you should now have the new boot animation successfully installed on your device. Simply restart it and you should see it running upon boot.
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