is there a good tutorial on making skins for xbmc? i am very new to xbmc, but have some time under my belt doing lite coding work (some c++ type stuff, html, etc) and was thinking about toying around with skins. with xbmc web site being down i can't check there, and i am not having much luck turning up anything that is explained simply enough for me to follow. any links would be great. thanks
first of all look into the graphics design section in this forum here
http://www.xboxmediaplayer.de/cgi-bin....=sf;f=7
then download an exisiting skin and try to understand it - it's pretty easy.
all graphics are in the media-folder and the xml-files for the positions and sizes of the graphics are in the "pal" or "ntsc"-folder. the xml-files are named after the corresponding screen like home.xml (home-screen), myprograms.xml (my programs)... the video and music-screen have 6 xmls for each view: mymusicsongs.xml / myvideo.xml (songs-view), mymusicalbums.xml / myvideoactors.xml (album-view) and so on. it's pretty selfdescribing.
the most important xml-file however is "references.xml" - in this file you find all controls (e.g. listcontrol, thumbcontrol, default buttons, labels,) which xbmc and a skinner can use. if you edit this controls (e.g another color, position), you will be able to customize a skin very fast.
most of the skins have compressed images in the graphics-folder, so for learning purposes you need one without this compressed xpr-file.
you have 2 possibilities:
- download the graphics of the default-xbmc-skin (project mayhem) from sourceforge.net
- or download a skin from
www.xbox-skins.net. one skin which has uncompressed graphics is
simplygreen, another should be
the-orbs
let's make some great skins!
exelent! thanks for the info! i do not have simply green, but i do have the lastest orbs skin (and use it as my default skin to boot!
. this is the kind of stuff that i was looking for! again, my thanks