How to change skin outside of XBMC
#1
This problem is a bit weird,
The installation works, sort of.
The platform is a small arm (Allwinner A10) credit card sized board running debian. (wheezy). XBMC is installed.

but with the default confluence skin (with it's animations) CPU use is 100%.
the device is unusable, selecting menu items using an attached keyboard just doesn't work, attempting to use the mouse is impossible, there is so much lag just trying to get to the settings screen that it's impossible to use.

I've used UART to connect to the board and run top and can see that the xbmc bin process is using 100% CPU.

some searching suggests that the default animations in the confluence skin may be causing this.

I know I can fix my issues by changing the skin, but since the animations in the skin are so CPU intensive it kills the usability of the platform and I can't change the skin!

if there a way to change the skin outside of the program? editing configuration files or replacing skin files etc?
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#2
The default skin is pretty light, but there is probably lighter. However your machine just may be too weak to run xbmc well.

First thing to note, changing guisettings.xml while xbmc is running does not work. When xbmc shuts down, it saves what it's current settings and overwrites what you just crafted in your editor. So shut down xbmc before you change these settings.

First turn off rss, it is a cpu hog. It is set via this line in guisettings.xml


<enablerssfeeds default="true">true</enablerssfeeds>

Change the second "true" to "false".

Second you can manually download any skin you think might be better. They come in a zip file and you can unzip it to your addons folder. That will result in a directory there called skin.xxx where xxx is the name of the skin. Then you can set the skin in guisetttings.xml via this line:

<skin>skin.sio2</skin>

(You'll see there that my skin is currently sio2.)

Skins that seem to be light are Amber, Quartz, Bellow, or xTV-SAF.
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How to change skin outside of XBMC0