I've been using Transparency! since I first found it back in the Helix days. For the past 4 years I've been on a Kodi DSPlayer (Krypton) version with Transparency. I finally decided that it wasn't worth the pain of continuing to use DSPlayer and MadVR and decided to give the latest version of Kodi a shot. Naturally I randomly chose the day Omega was released. Imagine my surprise to find out that the only skin I've known for the past 10 years is no longer available and hasn't been maintained in awhile.
Anyway, I'm highly motivated to figure out a way around this problem and get Transparency working again on Omega. Here's where I'm at:
I've had a portable installation since I started messing with DSPlayer because I wanted to be able to have multiple Kodi versions side by side without issue. I installed Omega, and then copied over my entire portable data folder without changing a thing. I have two profiles: Master User and a kids profile with different libraries, both of which were using Transparency. When I first loaded up Kodi, it opened the Master User and I was greeted with Estuary like everybody else. However, when I switched to the kids profile, I had Transparency just like before. That tells me it can work regardless of what Kodi thinks/says.
I manually edited my guisettings.xml to use <setting id="lookandfeel.skin">skin.transparency</setting> like the other profile, but on startup I get:
kodi.log:
2024-04-08 17:51:21.076 T:60096 error <general>: Failed to load skin 'skin.transparency'
2024-04-08 17:51:21.076 T:60096 info <general>: Unloaded skin
2024-04-08 17:51:21.083 T:60096 info <general>: load skin from: C:\Program Files\Kodi v21\addons\skin.estuary\ (version: 4.0.0)
...
No other useful information on why it failed to load. Notably, that error is not present when I switch to the kids profile.
Things I've tried:
I went in and edited transparency's addon.xml to change xmbc.gui to:
<import addon="xbmc.gui" version="5.17.0" /> but that didn't help.
I did update the service.skin.widgets to the 0.0.34 added above which gets recent movie/tv working as shown above, but doesn't help with loading the skin.
I'm going to back everything up and try and see what happens if I set Kids to be the startup profile. Will it kill off transparency? If not, the hacky fix would seem to be to make a copy of the Master User profile and then load that as id=2 on startup or something. I'll report back after I can try that later on.
If anybody has other ideas, let me know and I'll be sure and try them out.