[lunias]

Hello,

I have a few questions related to installing skins on ATV2...

I've seen that all the guides suggest copying the skin zip archive over to /private/var/mobile and then using the addon "install from zip" functionality to extract the skin to the proper directory. This begs the question; what does this function do exactly? Does it simply unzip the archive to a specific directory or does it do additional processing which is key to a proper skin install?

I have run into issues with the "install from zip" function on multiple occasions where I select the zip and then it appears to do nothing and no status updates are shown whatsoever. I ensure the permissions are correct, but I get the same results...

I would much prefer to simply install my skins manually over ssh. Is there a guide for doing so? If I extract my skin zip, rename to skin.blah/ and scp it over to my ATV2 where does it need to end up?

scp -r skin.blah root@atv2:/[what directory goes here]
extra configuration needed?

Thanks for any insights,

Lunias

[lunias]

So I decided to stop being lazy and dig into the source a bit. It appears that installing a skin involves extracting the zip, reading and installing the dependencies listed in addon.xml, copying the extracted directory to the "special://home/addons/" directory, updating guisettings.xml, and reloading the skin.

Since manually installing depends doesn't sound very appealing I guess I am stuck with the addon installer. As soon as I get back to my ATV2 I'll enable debug logging and try and figure out what is going on with my zip file.

https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/blob/master...taller.cpp InstallFromZip() and more specifically line 287 has me interested... What is special about github generated zip files? I am in fact trying to install a skin from a zip which I got from a git repo.

[canadave]

The advantage of installing an addon (including skins) from zip is that by doing so, you're installing a repo. You then go into the repo and install the addon (which can be a skin). The reason this is an advantage is that when the addon author updates the addon, you'll get the update automatically installed without you having to do anything.

Now, you can also install an addon manually by downloading the addon's zip file, extracting it, and uploading the contents to the /var/mobile/Library/Preferences/XBMC/addons directory. You can use command line utilities to do that, but I prefer to simply use an FTP client (making sure that the ownership permissions are set to mobile:mobile on everything once you've done so). The only issue here is that you won't have the automatic updates whenever the addon gets updated.

[Ned Scott]

ZIP can be used for repo or the add-on directly. The main advantage is what lunias has already found out, that installing from zip checks and installs dependancies for the add-on.

[canadave]

ZIP can be used for repo or the add-on directly. The main advantage is what lunias has already found out, that installing from zip checks and installs dependancies for the add-on.

There are addons that can be directly installed by using "Install from Zip" in the Addons screen? The learning continues

[lunias]

There are addons that can be directly installed by using "Install from Zip" in the Addons screen? The learning continues

Yep . I'm trying to install the reFocus Big mod on Frodo nightly and as such I need to use the latest version hosted in the git repo at https://github.com/paulsalem/skin-refocusbig

I wasn't able to debug from my ATV2 last night, but I'm still brainstorming what the problem could possibly be... The comments in InstallFromZip():

// BUG: some zip files return a single item (root folder) that we think is stored, so we don't use the zip:// protocol

and...

// TODO: possibly add support for github generated zips here?

have me thinking that there is some irregularity with my zip file which is preventing a clean install. I haven't dealt with C++ in the past so I can only glean the basic flow of the code, but from what I've seen I'd expect my zip to work fine.

Code:

unzip -l skin-refocusbig-master.zip | \grep addon.xml
   2918  12/04/2012 13:59   skin-refocusbig-master/addon.xml

It's a zip file, it has a root directory within it, it has an addon.xml directly off of the root directory... hmmm I guess I'm done theory crafting. I'll post some logs next.

[Martijn]

Just rezip the skins/addons