The desc.txt for boot animations works like this

[csmith197]

Ok,
After looking through the bootanimation.zip, I was able to map it and overcome alot of the inefficiencies that exist in the process we use to modify boot animations by simplifying the bootanimation.zip to 1 folder and only the pictures needed for your loop.


When we open the bootanimation.zip, it is obvious that there is a folder which holds png's and a text file which controls the behavior of the aforementioned png's. A lot of people have been hypothesizing what these configurations do, and after reading what they have tried I made my own effort and quiet easily mastered the file structure and desc text file. I will explain here how it works.


When you open desc.txt it displays only one line of code

 480 427 30p 1 0 part0p 0 10 part1

But if you copy and paste it into another text editor the code comes out looking like this

480 427 30
p 1 0 part0
p 0 10 part1

This format is the way the code should actually be read and can be broken down like this


480= width/height
427=width/height
30=frames per second
p= not exactly sure, but I think it's just a pointer for the previous line to this line of code
1= times to be replayed (0=infinite)
10 = pause If pause = 10, it will show the last frame and then sleep 10/fps seconds before continuing with the animation. (Thank you aequitas from alldroid forums!)
part0=folder name



With this in mind, I tried deleting both; the last line of code, and the part1 folder. This made sense to me because droid gave us 2 logical boot animations and if we only wanted a loop of one logical animation than why make a duplicate just to host in another folder and take space?


Next thing I looked at was the names of the png's. The First notable thing is they have a uniform, ascending filename structure, which correlates to the order they are to be played in. The first one starts with 480_427_00000.png. Looking at this it was obvious to me that that the first part, 480_427 was arbitrary because it relates to the first line fo the desc.txt, and the boot animations still work regardless if they match or not. While I haven’t tried yet, I feel it is safe to assume that they can be simplified to their 5 digit numerical filename if one so wished.


Armed with this I realized that our future boot animations only will only require 1 folder (part0) and the desc.text only needs 2 lines of code.

480 480 10
p 0 11 part0

Furthermore, as a result of deleting png's it was realized that the folder sizes are only limited by the 5 bit filename which leaves the possibility of storing 9,765,625 images since 5^10=9,765,625.


This is what I was able to figure out and I hope you guys are able to make some better stuff than me with the knowledge. Enjoy

[Backnblack]

storing 9,765,625 images

Might have to get popcorn to watch that.....

Great Work!

[Big Lou]

Cool read.

Wouldn't you be able to name the pngs anything you want as long as they are in numerical order? Also, it should be noted that the reason Motorola used 2 folders was so that one part of the animation would run once and the second part would loop.

[csmith197]

Thank you. I haven't tried using more or less than 5 digits, but theoretically as long as they are in order then it should work

[csmith197]

::edited to reflect that 10 = pause If pause = 10, it will show the last frame and then sleep 10/fps seconds before continuing with the animation. ::

[Xerozix]

It would be really cool to change my company logo and name with the Droid text. Anyone know of a software to let me generate images froma movie? Lol

[lvlln]

It would be really cool to change my company logo and name with the Droid text. Anyone know of a software to let me generate images froma movie? Lol

FFMpeg can do it. Check out this little guide:

How-To: Extract images from a video file using FFmpeg - Stream #0

I've found that the "-f image2" option causes problems and isn't needed on my computer.

[mammlouk]

Yep, FFMpeg ftw. I'm working on a bash script for linux that will start with a video, run it through ffmpeg to get the images, create a desc.txt and package it all up for the Droid. It also has the capability to use youtube-dl to source the video from youtube. Once the script is cleaned up a bit (probably a couple days from now) I will make it available on request.

[csmith197]

Thats sounds cool. I will definitely want to check that out.

[Greenblurr93]

Bringing this back to ask a question i hope hasnt been asked... i currently use 2 folders, part0 and part1, is there a way to slow the frame rate down when it plays part0 and not part1?? or is the frame rate set for the entire animation? i suppose i could add some duplicate frames in there to slow it down but i was wondering if this is possible so i dont need to do all that work (my boot animation has over 100 png's)


THANKS!