Great skin! I use it on my ATV2 and it works very well. A few pointers for those wanting to run this skin on ATV2 with best results:
Optimize Thumbnail and Fanart Size
Change your advancedsettings.xml to look like this:
Code:
<advancedsettings>
<thumbsize>256</thumbsize>
<fanartheight>360</fanartheight>
</advancedsettings>
This does result in some pixelation when displaying fanart at full screen resolution (I have a 720p plasma so this is hardly noticable to me, but those with LCDs will likely notice it more). Unfortunately the ATV2 struggles with high resolution fanart so this is a compromise - the resulting speedup is quite dramatic though, it goes from being barely usable to quite snappy. You will unfortunately either have to rescan everything to get your thumb/fanart cache in the new resolution, or manually resize your existing images unless you are starting from scratch.
The good news is that in ReFocus the only place where fanart is displayed full screen without the blue overlay is on the home screen slideshow (it is somewhat pixelated here due to it being blown up to 720p - like I said it is a compromise). Everywhere else it is either quarter resolution (640x360) or it is obscured with the blue alpha-transparent overlay which completely obscures the fact that the fanart is low res and it looks very nice in all the media views.
A thumsize of 256 is pratically optimum for all but the video info dialog where it is scaled to nearly full screen height. Other than that one view, it looks great virtually everywhere. I can't honestly recommend anything higher on an ATV2 though, it bogs it down considerably.
These changes alone will result in the media views going from practically unusable to quite responsive. It is still a bit slow compared to a full blown HTPC of course, but it is definitely usable.
Optimize Skin Background Images
This is optional, but I chose to resize all of the images in the skins backgrounds and backgrounds/library folders that where either 1280x720 or 1920x1080 to 640x360 manually using an image editor. The main effect this has is that it speeds up the tween effects between different views since it reduces the number of bytes the renderer has to chew through. Also, the few places where the skin specifies backgrounds (like settings and such) get a significant speedup from resizing the built in fanart images.
Alternately, you can just turn off global fanart and only resize the background.png and background2.png files (since those are the ones that mainly matter).
This has a very minor effect on image quality. The overlays are just smooth gradients anyway, scaling them down and then back up doesn't affect image quality much at all.
I did not bother with the welcome background images (the ones in the morning, afternoon, and evening folders). For some reason these do not display on an ATV2 at all so I never bothered to optimize them (cant figure out why...). The welcome _image_ displays, but not the background. Minor irritation I can live with for now - it is probably some esoteric issue with the rendering on the ATV2 and will probably get fixed eventually.
Fix the Virtual Keyboard
There is one major issue with the virtual keyboard in ReFocus when used on an ATV2. There is no way to navigate to the backspace button (which is to the right of the text entry field). This may not matter much on other platforms, but it is definitely a problem with the ATV2 when using the Apple Remote. To fix it youll have to modify DialogKeyboard.xml and make the following changes:
1. Find the text <control type="button" id="8">. Within that tag, change the value for <ondown> to 57.
2. Find the text <control type="button" id="57">. Within that tag, change the value for <onup> to 8.
This will make it so that pushing "up" while on the button for the 9 key will move you to the backspace key and visa-versa. With this one change the keyboard is quite usable.
Anyway, that is all I can think of at the moment. This skin works very well on the ATV2 if setup this way. All the other types of tweaks you may want to do can be done in the settings/skins menu, which has quite a few knobs to turn. I can't say I have used the skin extensively so there might be issues I have not seen yet, but the basics are solid.