For various reasons you might want to change the Android boot animation to something other than the stock one, this is how you do it.

There exists official documentation for how to create a custom boot animation, but unfortunately it is lacking in actual examples.

So this guide is a bit more hands-on.

Structure of bootanimation.zip

Without covering too much of the same gound as the documentation, let's have a quick look at what is in a simple bootanimation.zip.

$ ls -la bootanimation
total 28
drwxr-xr-x 4 hottuna hottuna 4096 Apr 19 22:39 .
drwxr-xr-x 8 hottuna hottuna 4096 Apr 19 22:39 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 hottuna hottuna   92 Apr 19 15:21 desc.txt
drwxr-xr-x 2 hottuna hottuna 4096 Apr 19 12:44 part0
drwxr-xr-x 2 hottuna hottuna 4096 Apr 19 12:45 part1

$ cat bootanimation/desc.txt 
1920 1080 30         # WIDTH HEIGHT FPS
c 5 15 part0 FFFFFF  # TYPE COUNT PAUSE PATH [#RGBHEX] [CLOCK]
c 5 15 part1 FFFFFF  # TYPE COUNT PAUSE PATH [#RGBHEX] [CLOCK]

ls -la bootanimation/part0 
total 28
drwxr-xr-x 2 hottuna hottuna  4096 Apr 19 12:44 .
drwxr-xr-x 6 hottuna hottuna  4096 Apr 19 15:40 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 hottuna hottuna 10688 Apr 19 12:31 0000.png
-rw-r--r-- 1 hottuna hottuna 10688 Apr 19 12:31 0001.png
-rw-r--r-- 1 hottuna hottuna 10688 Apr 19 12:31 0002.png
-rw-r--r-- 1 hottuna hottuna 10688 Apr 19 12:31 0003.png
-rw-r--r-- 1 hottuna hottuna 10688 Apr 19 12:31 XXXX.png

Note that the "#" comments are mine and not actually present in the files.

An important thing to note with the zip file is needs to have compression turned off.

Switch bootanimation

Download bootanimation.zip.

unzip bootanimation.zip
cd bootanimation
# Edit desc.txt and partN folders to your needs
zip -0qry -i \*.txt \*.png \*.wav @ ../bootanimation.zip *.txt part*

# Option 1, use adb to send bootanimation.zip
adb root
adb remount
adb push bootanimation.zip /system/media/bootanimation.zip

# Option 2, bake bootanimation.zip into your AOSP build
cp bootanimation.zip /opt/aosp/out/target/product/linaro_arm/system/bootanimation.zip
./your_favorite_buildscript_here.sh

References

bootanimation documentation

Thanks!

This post has been a part of work undertaken by my employer Collabora.

Original post