[roveer]

Sorry if I sound dumb but what skin is CCM?

Confluence Customized Mod. At first glance it doesn't look like much, but once you get into it's inner workings it has a lot of neat customization's. I wanted it because I wanted a somewhat lightweight skin to run on my lower powered hardware and it was also suggested to me because of my desire to represent the single video library in different ways via sub menu's and smart playlists. I don't know how many other skins have that capability. Once I started poking around I turned on "live content" and got this incredible main screen which to me was the icing on the cake. Here's an example of the main screen. Not my own, but gives you an idea.



On my system I have weather in the upper left hand corner (useful for at a glance) as well as on the main menu screen for when you want a more detailed forecast. The live content displays pictures based on current conditions and is pretty slick. I only have 3 main menu options MOVIES, TV SHOWS, WEATHER. No PROGRAMS, no SYSTEM etc. Very very simple. For sub menu's I don't show any of the inner workings of xbmc, just a couple of options that allow you to view the collection in a few different ways, sorted by date added and alphabetic. I also installed and have turned on the search option which gives you the ability to find content by search term. Very useful to see if you have a particular movie.

I'm very happy with the results I obtained considering I wanted something that looked less like a tech geek's system (RSS feeds, up arrows "..'s" disk icons, file names, folders etc). That's what my Samsung TV media hub looks like and I'm thoroughly disgusted with it. Not to mention how do you page through thousands of movies when you can only see 6 at a time on the screen. Totally worthless. My XBMC looks more like something you would buy from a store with a fully developed UI, (although no media streamer that I've come across does anything remotely as good as XBMC, tried WDTV, Roku, etc), simple capable hardware, nice easy to use remote (RF). XBMC is so flexible you have the tools to make it look just about any way you want. You do however have to be willing to spend the time and effort to get it working that way, or find a setup that someone else has done that fits your needs and use it. WATCHED FLAG was such a big thing for me it's one of the main things that kept me with XBMC. A few other systems looked good, but really fell down in flexibility and didn't have the watched flag. Having it with SQL across my 2, soon to be 6 xbmc's was a huge deal. More Icing, Pause/Resume. Start in Family Room, finish in bedroom. Yup, that's an advanced feature that only a few networked STB's can provide. Huge.

I know that CCM is available in the "super repo" repository and I'm not sure what others may also have it.