Friday, March 23, 2012

Custom Boot Animations

If you are tired of that low res, washed out boot animation on your Galaxy Nexus (or really any Android Phone), its easy to change - provided you are rooted of course.


In ICS I believe there are 2 locations for bootanimation.zip files to be installed. The "factory" location is under /system/media/ and the alternative is under /data/local/. Even though the system/media location is the stock/factory one, the data/local one overrides it. I have run half a dozen bootanimation.zips on my Nexus with no problem....just delete whichever one is in the data/local folder and paste in a new one. This allows you to keep the stock one intact in case you ever want to go back to it (just delete the data/local version). Oh, and if you are one of those people who constantly change ROMs and wipe/reset your phone, the data/local file won't be erased whereas the system/media will. So, there's another reason to use the data/local location.


There are a couple of ways to load a custom bootanimation. Some people package their animations as a zip installer that you have to run through either recovery or Clockwork, but I think that adds quite a bit of unnecessary time. I prefer to just copy the bootanim.zip file directly to my phone storage. Quick and Easy.  


Note: If you find a bootanimation you like, but its setup as a zip installer, its simple to extract the bootanim.zip. The installer zip will have a name like "fireworksbootanimation.zip". Just open the installer zip, open the 'data' folder, open the 'local' folder, and copy the bootanim.zip file within.


I found this thread on Rootzwiki that has a BOATLOAD of custom boot animation files. I mean, there's a million of them including user requests. Its 50 pages long but worth going through if you have the time. There are also a whole section dedicated to boot animations including things like NFL and NHL Team Themes. 


If you are the creative type, you can even make your own. There's a nice tutorial here on how to do it.





- DnT

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