Did you know you can change the boot animation on the Steam Deck? Well you can and the community has naturally gone and done some pretty amazing things with it.
After messing around for a little while, I've come up with a full and hopefully easy enough guide to follow both in video and text form for anyone interested in doing it themselves. This was directly inspired by a Reddit post on it where the user changed their Steam Deck bootup to a Futurama animation with the Steam Deck wording which is pretty fantastic.
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Direct Link
Direct Link
Text Guide:
- First, you need a .webm video file of an animation, whatever you want. You can easily convert videos to webm using services like CloudConvert, your favourite video editor or even ffmpeg scripts.
- In your Home folder in a file manager, unhide the files. CTRL+H or via the options menu in the top right.
- Head to .local/share/Steam/steamui/movies/ and make a backup of deck_startup.webm if you wish.
- Get the filesize of the deck_startup.webm by right click -> properties and make a note of the one in brackets.
- Replace the original deck_startup.webm with your chosen video file, using the same name.
- Open a terminal window inside this folder (right click -> open terminal) and run this command (with the correct filesize you noted):
truncate -s 1840847 deck_startup.webm
- Go into .local/share/Steam/steamui/css/ and make a backup of library.css and again make a note of the filesize. This file tends to change filesize between Steam Deck updates.
- Open the library.css file, go to the line that has "video" and edit just after it to read like this:
video{flex-grow:1;width:100%; height:100%; z-index:10}
- Now open a terminal inside this folder as you did before, then run this (with the correct filesize you noted):
truncate -s 38492 library.css
Now you're done. You can reboot and watch your new boot video! Enjoy.
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Quoting: randylYeah, I got that and it's a cool article. I hope my questions didn't come across as trying to undermine your tutorial. I was just curious about the technical details. It's a very cool hack.Not at all, always happy to explain where I can even when the original instructions are not my own :) (as linked in the OP). Hopefully we can find better ways to do it eventually and have it stick around, or Valve just lets us mess with it officially.
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Quoting: dosThe change you're supposed to apply actually makes the file a bit smaller (you edit `0` to `1` and `300px` to `100%` twice), so the point of that truncate command is to make the file larger again to match the original size.That explains it, thanks muchly!
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May I introduce you to r/SteamDeckBootVids and also a script to randomise the boot video at Github: randomise boot videos though there is a forked version at Github: randomise boot videos and edit system that changes system files for you to tweak the fullscreen and allow longer videos, and some other changes.
EDIT: If you use the script to change the system files, it does not always fully work. This may be because it is designed for stable branch and the beta branch files are different enough that it fails. You may need to make tweaks using the guide linked in the introduction on the github readme.
Last edited by Supay on 3 October 2022 at 11:11 am UTC
EDIT: If you use the script to change the system files, it does not always fully work. This may be because it is designed for stable branch and the beta branch files are different enough that it fails. You may need to make tweaks using the guide linked in the introduction on the github readme.
Last edited by Supay on 3 October 2022 at 11:11 am UTC
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