Boot Animation

The boot animation on an Android-based phone is a short animated video accompanied by sound that plays on the phone immediately after the splash screen is shown. It is often branded with the logo of the carrier for which the phone is intended to be released. Upon rooting the phone, the boot animation is customizable by replacing the sequence of images in the bootanimation.zip file as well as the corresponding mp3 audio file. Both files reside in the /system partition, so an unlocked bootloader is required to make the change.

bootanimation.zip
The location of the bootanimation.zip file is yet to be determined for the Evo 3D. The file is a regular .zip archive containing a folder with .PNG images representing individual frames of the animation, as well as a file named desc.txt, which contains instructions on how the animation is to be rendered. A sample desc.txt is shown and deciphered below:

480 800 7p 0 0 android

480 = width of image 800 = height of image 7p = 7 frames per second 0 = times to loop animation, where 0 loops all images in zip forever 0 = pause between loop, where 0 = no pause, and 10 = longest pause android = folder containing images

Inside the 'android' folder are .PNG files used to render the animation and must be either 8-bit or 24-bit format. The Photoshop default for saving .PNG files is 32-bit, so the 'Save as Web' function must be utilized to choose 8- or 24-bit. Files will be animated based on alphabetical order of the file names. When adding the .PNG files to the .ZIP archive, one must not use compression, which is the default setting on an archiver program like WinRAR. The images need to be placed into the archive in order for the boot animation to work correctly. Once the custom .zip is created, simply replace it with the original, and on next reboot, the phone should display the custom animation.

Corresponding Audio File
Coming soon.... xdlol