How To | Change Your HTC Incredible Boot Animation

For those of you that own an HTC Incredible, or possibly any other Android powered phone, you may or may not like your boot animation. I, for one, do not like the Incredible’s stock boot animation. It’s pretty lame to be complately honest. So I decided it was time to make a change.

There are plenty of tutorials for doing this on a Windows based box, but that was not cutting it for me. Here is a How To for Android owners for changing your boot animation using your Ubuntu box. These directions may work for other distro’s as well, however, I have not tested, so YMMV.

Note: DO NOT plug the phone to your computer yet.

Step 1: Download

• Your choice of: bootanimation.zip and android_audio.mp3 (.mp3 file must be named “android_audio.mp3”)

Step 2: Edit desc.txt file

• Unzip bootanimation.zip and edit desc.txt file
• Use editors of your choice (gedit, kate)
• Your desc.txt would be something like:

325 430 15
p 1 0 android
p 1 0 eye
p 0 0 loading

• Make sure you save it as a UNIX file, otherwise it won’t work
• Zip the folder up again (without compression) – bootanimation.zip

Note: I only extracted the desc.txt file and not the entire contents of bootanimation.zip. After editing desc.txt, I just re-added that back into the original bootanimation.zip file. This worked for me. YMMV.
Step 3: Install Android SDK

• Android SDK | Android Developers
• Extract .zip file; you could rename extracted folder to whatever you like (e.g., “android”)
• Move “android” folder to the root of your drive using this command in your terminal:

sudo mv /path/to/android /

• Run “Android SDK and AVD Manager” using this command: (I added mine to the Applications menu)

/android/tools/android update sdk

Note: that you do not need to download any drivers for Linux. The phone is already supported.
Step 4: Copy/Move

• Copy/Move your bootanimation.zip and android_audio.mp3 files into the “tools” folder of the SDK (e.g., /android/tools)

Step 5: On Your Incredible

• Turn USB Debugging ON (Settings->Applications->Development)
• NOW, you can connect your phone to the PC
• You should get an exclamation mark icon on your Incredible notification bar
• Be sure to set/mount your USB connection to “Disk Drive”; do not use “Charge only”

Step 6: Test Your Setup

• Open terminal
• Change directory to the “tools” folder in your SDK (e.g., /android/tools)
• Run the following command:

sudo ./adb start-server (you need to be in root for this to work)

• You should see something like this:

* daemon not running. starting it now *
* daemon started successfully *
List of devices attached
HT048HJ00425 device

Step 7: Push Animation/Audio

• Run the following commands:

adb push bootanimation.zip /data/local
adb push android_audio.mp3 /data/local (if you want sound during bootup)

• You should have seen that a certain amount of data was added to the phone after each command

Step 8: Reboot Your Incredible

• You might want to go through the proper procedure for unmounting/disconnecting your phone from your computer first
• You might want to turn off USB Debugging
• Enjoy your new animated boot screen

Sources: Incredible Boot Animation, Android SDK | Android Developers, Installing HTC Incredible Android SDK Drivers

Note: this worked for me. This may or may not work for you. If, by following this, you brick your Incredible, I am not liable for anything.