[zackpliskin]

The only thing i cant never remove is the "language bar" or something like that...

Little button in the top left? This can be removed from the logon screen using Resource Hacker, I forget how exactly. Also, you can remove the user picture and frame, and move the Ctrl-Alt-Del menu options too. Very hit and miss to do: there are no real guides on how to do this accurately online it seems, and if you mess up your authui.dll file and don't notice then you can stop Windows booting at all!

[baijuxavior]

The only thing i cant never remove is the "language bar" or something like that...

How To: Remove The Language Button From Your Logon Screen

[zackpliskin]

I've gone ahead and made an animated XBMC Eden bootscreen for Windows 7, works nicely for startup and resume. Got a Ubuntu "dotted lights" feel to it - logo fades in and then the five dots light up in a left to right stream. Format is a standard BS7 file that works with Win7BootUpdater.exe so no trouble there.

Get it here.

[baijuxavior]

Tested it. Looks good. Need to install it in my htpc. Thanks.

[Skank]

Gonna test it too thx

[TeKo]

I've gone ahead and made an animated XBMC Eden bootscreen for Windows 7, works nicely for startup and resume. Got a Ubuntu "dotted lights" feel to it - logo fades in and then the five dots light up in a left to right stream. Format is a standard BS7 file that works with Win7BootUpdater.exe so no trouble there.

Get it here.

Wow looks great.
Just this, login black and XBMC as shell looks near perfect.

[ibramadhan]

I've gone ahead and made an animated XBMC Eden bootscreen for Windows 7, works nicely for startup and resume. Got a Ubuntu "dotted lights" feel to it - logo fades in and then the five dots light up in a left to right stream. Format is a standard BS7 file that works with Win7BootUpdater.exe so no trouble there.

Get it here.

Hey man, Thanks so much loving it, only one issue im booting from an SSD so the system boots befor i even see the dots under the logo, any advice?

[zackpliskin]

Hey man, Thanks so much loving it, only one issue im booting from an SSD so the system boots befor i even see the dots under the logo, any advice?

Be happy. I wish my machine booted that fast! I was tempted to drop in an SSD but when I take my Revo out I prefer having any content on the internal 250GB HDD rather than lugging around my 2TB 3.5" USB2 drive, much easier. The slower boot time of a regular HDD can be negated by booting XBMC fresh, then hibernating. When it's hooked up and boots round someone elses place it takes about ten seconds to resume, looks pretty slick.

Speaking of hibernation under Windows 7, I have found that the Win7BootUpdater app doesn't seem to remove the "Resuming Windows" text. I manually edited out of C:\Windows\system32\winresume.exe and C:\Windows\system32\en-US\winresume.exe.mui using Resource Hacker. I'd recommend that to anyone looking to remove as much Windows branding as possible when going for a HTPC appliance frontend. Other text to remove from the login screen can mostly be found in the authui.dll file, including "Welcome" and "Please wait" type stuff. I stripped my system files of that but left in all the important stuff like System Restore and Windows Update text. I also resized the XBMC Eden logo splash that shows when XBMC loads to 1920x1080 and made sure the logo was exactly the same size as it is there so the logon screen backdrop and the XBMC splash appear identical.

About the only thing you can't get rid of upon "boot from cold" scenario is when Windows loads it shows the logon background, then it disappears briefly for the autologon, then it disappears again for a little longer during the transition from logon screen to showing the XBMC splash as XBMC is loaded. This is why I'd recommend either leaving your HTPC on all the time (if it's a low power usage nettop or similar, of course) or using sleep/hibernation to ensure a quick drop back to XBMC. More so the former if you have an IR remote that won't make the HTPC wake from sleep as I do.

Thanks for the positive comments guys, I'm crap at animating stuff so I'm glad the XBMC Windows 7 boot animation turned out okay. I deliberately stretched it so the aspect ratio is correct on a HDTV, as I've noticed that when running via HDMI on a device which tells the graphics card it can do widescreen resolutions like 1280x720p and 1920x1080p the regular 1024x768 boot animation and text look squashed. I'm a bit miffed at Windows developers choosing to make the loop part of the animation 45 frames rather than, say, fifty, but in most cases you can't tell that the second pause between the lights is one frame longer than the first!

[redglory]

I've gone ahead and made an animated XBMC Eden bootscreen for Windows 7, works nicely for startup and resume. Got a Ubuntu "dotted lights" feel to it - logo fades in and then the five dots light up in a left to right stream. Format is a standard BS7 file that works with Win7BootUpdater.exe so no trouble there.

Get it here.

Hey man, Thanks so much loving it, only one issue im booting from an SSD so the system boots befor i even see the dots under the logo, any advice?

Wow!

I've also got an SSD and I can see the dots just for a bit! It takes some time to start showing dots.

Great animated bootscreen btw. Thanks zackpliskin

[baijuxavior]

I use hibernation and the system is ready in 10 seconds. But this causes one problem. My avr is not ready by that time and xbmc can't find hdmi audio. I have to close and restart xbmc again for audio to work.

[redglory]

I use hibernation and the system is ready in 10 seconds. But this causes one problem. My avr is not ready by that time and xbmc can't find hdmi audio. I have to close and restart xbmc again for audio to work.

My system is alwasy on. I've disabled Hibernation/Sleep. This way i can always remote desktop my machine.

I don't think it causes major consuption by disabling hibernation, right?

[baijuxavior]

Keeping my system always on is not possible with the quality of electricity we get here at my home. Too much voltage fluctuation and frequent power cuts.

[zackpliskin]

I've also got an SSD and I can see the dots just for a bit! It takes some time to start showing dots.

Yep, this is because Windows 7 uses a 105 frame animation sized at 200x200 and displayed at 1024x768, of which the first 60 frames are played straight and then the last 45 are looped until such a time as the login environment is ready to be deployed. At some point I might make an "SSD version" which has a faster fade-in or something but that will be a tad harder to animate.

Anyone care to throw a 32GB SATA SSD my way so I can get started?

I use hibernation and the system is ready in 10 seconds. But this causes one problem. My avr is not ready by that time and xbmc can't find hdmi audio. I have to close and restart xbmc again for audio to work.

Sometimes my external HDD is only recognised as USB1 speed upon resume, it's odd. In most cases I'd recommend not using standby at all, treating your XBMC HTPC like a TiVo which works best "always on".

My system is alwasy on. I've disabled Hibernation/Sleep. This way i can always remote desktop my machine.

I don't think it causes major consuption by disabling hibernation, right?

Being able to remote desktop to check on downloads or perhaps stream content from your home LAN to somewhere else on the WAN is nice, especially if you have a DSL with >10Mb upload so smaller HD rips can be pushed across without killing the bandwidth for anyone using the home LAN at the time.

In terms of power consumption it depends what sort of HTPC you have: in the case of my Acer Revo R3610, when idle it tends to draw about 15w, which is only slightly more than my cable modem does and certainly far less than the sum of cable modem, router and gigabit switch which forms the backbone of my LAN. Therefore, leaving it on all the time isn't going to draw a lot of mains power, especially if you do what I do and put all the devices which stay on standby when plugged in on a circuit-breaker ring which can be fully switched off by an IR code... for me it's one button to switch off my TV, smaller TV, home cinema rig and a few other things. So it balances out using the nettop on all the time with a USB2 HDD attached for mass storage.

Keeping my system always on is not possible with the quality of electricity we get here at my home. Too much voltage fluctuation and frequent power cuts.

Consider a UPS. You could leave a bunch of low energy devices hooked up to it, say the things needed to power your LAN and your HTPC. Better UPS units will "clean" the mains supply (by filtering spikes etc) and run for between ten minutes and an hour in the event of a power cut I think, depending on the model and how much the devices are drawing.

[redglory]

I've also got an SSD and I can see the dots just for a bit! It takes some time to start showing dots.

Yep, this is because Windows 7 uses a 105 frame animation sized at 200x200 and displayed at 1024x768, of which the first 60 frames are played straight and then the last 45 are looped until such a time as the login environment is ready to be deployed. At some point I might make an "SSD version" which has a faster fade-in or something but that will be a tad harder to animate.

Anyone care to throw a 32GB SATA SSD my way so I can get started?

I use hibernation and the system is ready in 10 seconds. But this causes one problem. My avr is not ready by that time and xbmc can't find hdmi audio. I have to close and restart xbmc again for audio to work.

Sometimes my external HDD is only recognised as USB1 speed upon resume, it's odd. In most cases I'd recommend not using standby at all, treating your XBMC HTPC like a TiVo which works best "always on".

My system is alwasy on. I've disabled Hibernation/Sleep. This way i can always remote desktop my machine.

I don't think it causes major consuption by disabling hibernation, right?

Being able to remote desktop to check on downloads or perhaps stream content from your home LAN to somewhere else on the WAN is nice, especially if you have a DSL with >10Mb upload so smaller HD rips can be pushed across without killing the bandwidth for anyone using the home LAN at the time.

In terms of power consumption it depends what sort of HTPC you have: in the case of my Acer Revo R3610, when idle it tends to draw about 15w, which is only slightly more than my cable modem does and certainly far less than the sum of cable modem, router and gigabit switch which forms the backbone of my LAN. Therefore, leaving it on all the time isn't going to draw a lot of mains power, especially if you do what I do and put all the devices which stay on standby when plugged in on a circuit-breaker ring which can be fully switched off by an IR code... for me it's one button to switch off my TV, smaller TV, home cinema rig and a few other things. So it balances out using the nettop on all the time with a USB2 HDD attached for mass storage.

Keeping my system always on is not possible with the quality of electricity we get here at my home. Too much voltage fluctuation and frequent power cuts.

Consider a UPS. You could leave a bunch of low energy devices hooked up to it, say the things needed to power your LAN and your HTPC. Better UPS units will "clean" the mains supply (by filtering spikes etc) and run for between ten minutes and an hour in the event of a power cut I think, depending on the model and how much the devices are drawing.

Can you extend a bit your explanation regarding your "circuit-breaker ring"?

I think my system might draw a little more power consumption:

(taken from a similar system)
Idle power consumption with HD in standby: 21W
Idle power consumption with HD I/O: 24W
Max power consumption: 28W

[baijuxavior]

Consider a UPS. You could leave a bunch of low energy devices hooked up to it, say the things needed to power your LAN and your HTPC. Better UPS units will "clean" the mains supply (by filtering spikes etc) and run for between ten minutes and an hour in the event of a power cut I think, depending on the model and how much the devices are drawing.

I have UPS that gives me 45 minutes backup with htpc, avr and TV. But still with the power conditions and climate here in India, we always turn off the devices when it is not needed.