I have just started to use XBMC, and am by no means a XBMC skinner.... yet 
But I am working on it.
That said, I just created a simple mod that will overlay a transparent PNG over the top of the DVD thumb, in the fanart view. This will make it look a little glassy, and rounded. It also adds the illusion of it being inside a DVD case with the black border around it. I tried it without the border, but the black background, where the rounded corners are, does not look so good.
This does not alter your cover images in any way, it just overlays the PNG with the black border over the cover to give it the glassy look. I am sure there are better ways to do this, but as this is my first graphic mod, I am not that familiar with the inner workings of XBMC as of yet.
Here is a screen cap of the overlay on top of the movie cover:
I thought someone else might want to toy around with it, and attached a zip file. In the zip is the ViewsVideoLibrary.xml (Renamed to ViewsVideoLibrary_OVERLAY.xml) *MAKE A BACKUP OF YOURS BEFORE YOU OVERWRITE IT ! *
You can create your own overlay PNG, and test different glass effects ect. If you come up with a better one, please post it in this thread
I also turned off the toggle to keep the aspect ratio of the cover in the .XML, When it was on, the covers are even just a few pixels wider or taller ect, the image appears to "jump around" when scrolling through the movies. Turning off the aspect ratio seems to work much better, and all of my covers are pretty much in the correct aspect ratio given a few pixels here and there, so absolutely no noticeable stretching happens when viewing the covers.
It also requires the png image in the zip, and the path I have it set for testing is C:\temp\overlay2.png. You can open the xml and do a text search for "Cover Highlight overlay" (line 514) to see the section where you can change the path to the image nad put it where ever you like.
Hopefully someone can get some use out of this....
Oh, and by all means, let me know what you think!
You can download it here
But I am working on it.That said, I just created a simple mod that will overlay a transparent PNG over the top of the DVD thumb, in the fanart view. This will make it look a little glassy, and rounded. It also adds the illusion of it being inside a DVD case with the black border around it. I tried it without the border, but the black background, where the rounded corners are, does not look so good.
This does not alter your cover images in any way, it just overlays the PNG with the black border over the cover to give it the glassy look. I am sure there are better ways to do this, but as this is my first graphic mod, I am not that familiar with the inner workings of XBMC as of yet.
Here is a screen cap of the overlay on top of the movie cover:
I thought someone else might want to toy around with it, and attached a zip file. In the zip is the ViewsVideoLibrary.xml (Renamed to ViewsVideoLibrary_OVERLAY.xml) *MAKE A BACKUP OF YOURS BEFORE YOU OVERWRITE IT ! *
You can create your own overlay PNG, and test different glass effects ect. If you come up with a better one, please post it in this thread
I also turned off the toggle to keep the aspect ratio of the cover in the .XML, When it was on, the covers are even just a few pixels wider or taller ect, the image appears to "jump around" when scrolling through the movies. Turning off the aspect ratio seems to work much better, and all of my covers are pretty much in the correct aspect ratio given a few pixels here and there, so absolutely no noticeable stretching happens when viewing the covers.
It also requires the png image in the zip, and the path I have it set for testing is C:\temp\overlay2.png. You can open the xml and do a text search for "Cover Highlight overlay" (line 514) to see the section where you can change the path to the image nad put it where ever you like.
Hopefully someone can get some use out of this....
Oh, and by all means, let me know what you think!
You can download it here
