[swany6mm]

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

[bobrooney_78]

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!

[swany6mm]

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