Arnt Gulbrandsen
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Android boot with animated GIF

I've hated the Cyanogenmod 11 boot animation since I first installed Cyanogenmod on my phone. Admittedly I don't see it often, but I hate it. These walking fingers, possibly drawn by Will Holmes, would be so much better. So I put together a shell script to convert animated GIF files to the format Android needs.

Now and then phones are lost, particularly at schools, and I have two children, so I added an option to add text.

Reddit's mesmerizinggifs is full of suitable input files. To download today's highest-scoring animation and annotate it with Nirmala's phone:

bootanim.sh http://i.imgur.com/kBhMzpk.gif "Nirmala's phone"

The resulting file is called bootanimation.zip and must be stored in /data/local/bootanimation.zip or /system/media/bootanimation.zip. You need root rights to write to in the latter location, but if stored there the animation will survive even a factory reset.

Update for people whose phones aren't black: