To present a clean and undisturbed splash screen, we are disabling the display of these items (in order of appearance)

• The four raspberries in the top left corner
• The boot message log
• A blinking cursor top left
• The splash image “Welcome to the Raspberry Pi Desktop”
• A one-liner with boot notifications below the splash image

Disable graphical outputs on boot

sudo nano /boot/cmdline.txt

A long line will open. At the end of this line add:

logo.nologo vt.global_cursor_default=0

• Replace console=tty1 to console=tty3 to redirect boot messages to the third console.
• Add loglevel=3 to disable non-critical kernel log messages.

Disable the rainbow screen the Pi boots with

sudo nano /boot/config.txt

Go to the very end and add as the last line:

disable_splash=1

Remove login prompt

Remove the login prompt by running:

sudo systemctl disable getty@tty3

Boot with a video or image as a splashscreen

We use omxplayer for that. So first we need to install it by:

sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install omxplayer

Next we tell the pi in the rc.local to play our video on boot:

sudo nano /etc/rc.local

In rc.local add before the end where it says exit 0 these two lines:

dmesg –console-off
omxplayer /home/pi/bootvideo_36sec.mov &