XBMC Clearity Skin Beta Posted by XanTium | January 4 00:19 EST

Smokehead released details and a beta of a new XboxMediaCenter(info) skin he's working on. It makes extensive use of the new XBMC v2.1 skinengine: [QUOTE] It's been a while since PDM has been updated, and some of you may wonder why. Well i can tell you that i was kind of busy these past months with personal as well other side projects and one of them was a new XBMC skin called "Clearity" or codename: "ProjectX". There were some goals that i wanted to accomplish but not many, one of them was to try and break the common button usage on the left and place them like tabs above the actual menu to increase space for the lists, panels, etc. also i wanted a clear looking skin with some custom options for users to use their own backgrounds if needed, so just the basic stuff. It also takes advantage of the highly new and top-of-the-line XBMC skin engine features like new lists and icon panels, wich we can only thank one man for .. jmarshall. these include better handling of dialog overlays, better list and icon panels, Wraplists.., better .The skin is in beta stage and this means that there can be flaws, ..hmm there will be flaws, so please report them in this tread if you encounter one so they will get fixed sooner or later.. thx in advance. More Screenshots here [/QUOTE] You can download the latest beta code of this skin on the XBMC Skinning SVN (on win32/64 you can use TortoiseSVN to download from a SVN). Also note that you must be using a recent build of XBMC pre-v2.1 (like the latest SVN T3CH Build). Thanks to pike for the news/link. Full Story/Official Thread: xboxmediacenter.com forums.

Oh my god. Thanks Smokehead!
I'll go give this a try right now. Always good to get a surprise for/from the scene every once in a while.

Oh my this looks sweeet! Downloading now and will report any bugs I find.

looks simple and nice

Now this is nice! Thanks so much man!

Wow. This skin is awesome. Absolutely great visual design.

cant wait

How do you download this? do you have to download all the separate parts

Can't wait to try this looks good

This is an absolutely awesome skin. i really like the BG changing option. Very cool smokehead. Very Cool.

I had trouble with the SVN link that was listed...I had success with this

https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/xboxmediacenter/Clearity

im so psyched to try this skin but i cant seem to get it to work. i followed the instructions and updated to the newset xbmc, compiled the skin properly, but then when i go to switch to it, it is greyed out.

i noticed one other person on the xbmc forums had this problem but fixed it by updating xbmc itself.
i already tried this and did a completely fresh install and still no luck.

then , and don't take this the wrong way you probably didn't update properly go into system info and check out what the actual build date it says down the bottom

see thats the weird thing, it says january 2, 2006 - just like it should.

i guess all i can do is try downloading it again and starting from scratch. no biggie looks like a good skin.

I have no idea how to download this thing, and normally I wouldn't ask, but... How do I do it?
I installed that Tortoise thing and it hasn't done anything for me in Firefox or IE that I can see. :S

Thanks for any help.

Edit: Also is there anything at all out there that's comparable to XBMC for PC? I tried Windows Media Center edition and it just didn't cut it, and now that I have a 360, and my Xbox 1 is upstairs, I really really miss XBMC. I'm a sucker for album art and covers and all that. And cool skins like this. So if anyone knows of a similar app for pc that would be great.

taken from xboxmediacentre forums:



when youre done all of this, make sure you run the batch file in the folder in order to prepare the skin.

Thanks a bunch PennyWisdom. Your help is much appreciated.

Looks sweet tits, can't wait to try it.

Wow, this skin is fantastic..... way to go smokehead! One question.... why "Clearity" and not "Clarity" ? As far as I know Clearity isn't a word and rolls off the tongue kinda funny... anyway irrelavant in the scheme of things... Thanks again and I will post any bugs I find.

I love this skin, Fantasic smokehead!!!!
Is there meant to be a background animation? there is a option there but i does nothing
Also when playing a video is it meant to show though the skin like when playing music the visulisation shows through.

Will wide icons be supported?
here is a mock up of what it would be like

looks beauuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuutiful! if that skin was a person, it would be Brooke Birk, no it would be Rebecca Romijn Stamos! hmm... maybe Heidi Kloom, or maybe that actress that plays Lex's wife in smallville, evangline hollyfield or something

Anyway, great skin smokehead! With your skills, I think we should call you Smokemaniac ;P

Looks great!! One bug I've spotted, when creating profiles it seems to get stuck after editing the master profile and even if you hit cancel the 'profile' screen is stuck on top of everything else.

Love the new wide scrolling icons, looks excellent with my movie collection!

Thanks everybody .. Yes theres a background animation but it's not done yet, ..that is the actual animation itself. The rest (code site of things) is in place.

I'm not sure yet what todo with video in the background as that will look weird with the black bars etc, or hi-res, but it is possible yes ... And yes working on Wide Icons atm.

Roflol

Thanks for reporting, I'll look into it now.

Also seems to be a bit messed up when trying to add a SMB network location.....

For those who are too confused with svn, heres a direct link to the Clearity Skin thanks to pike:

CLEARITY DOWNLOAD

now ive tried this with both the one i downloaded and i then tried the one posted above but i still get the same thing
when i goto load the skin it comes up with " incomptible skin we requsire skins of version 2.00 of higher"
and im currectly using XBMC-2.0.1-FINAL-FAT-T3CH
thanks in advance
Rip

try using the latest tech release 01/01/07

as bernard mathews might say "this skin is boooootifull!!"

Update your xbmc

thank you, will try it tonight.

keep up the good work

xbmc pre-2.1 > xbmc 2.0.1 final

newer > older

i can select the skin, but it appears in "grey" ... and nothing happen :'(
(got t3ch release, 12-25-2006)

Looks fantastic but there's an overlap problem where the image below letters like p and g overlaps their tails and if something is at the bottom of the list in icon mode the name can't be seen fully.

This is both running in 480p (16:9) and 720p (16:9).

There are several overlay, and overlap issues. I will post pictures in a few minutes.

Looks great! Really like the "Wrap List" view and the transition animations.

Only thing i am not feeling at the moment is the home screen. I like a good clean look, but this is a bit too clean for my tasting. Maybe some icons or now playing info could spice it up. The sub menu items are a good addon though. Would be sweet if you could customize these as bookmarks.

As for bugs. Most have been mentioned i think. A lot of them have to do with text overlap.

To finish, a little request: would it be possible that in "wrap list" view in music library, it only shows one Album cover if you have one cd for the artist. Now it shows the same album cover three times.

Thx and great work, Japser

on the weather channel, the city name overlaps bigtime if it's any longer than a few letters.

Yeah, it could do with some images for Videos, Music, Pictures, etc.

well thats how mine looks now... i haven't finished all the icons but i will... ill upload them when im finish


there are few bugs i notice: it wont delete files... i went to my files and it wont delete them!

it wont remove sources... such as the PNPnP or SMB

This is a very nice skin. Must have been a secret project for some time now. Who is helping you smokehead?

VERY nice! The skin isn't even complete yet and already I see some great additions - sweeet

The problem is actually that when it says, Delete/Remove? The "Yes" should have the box around it and the "No" should be under+overlined (<to select Yes). So it looks like you are selecting Yes but infact you selected No.

It also went to a black screen when I selected "Reload Skin" once, but its no biggie because I tried and I couldn't replicate it again. But for a compete surprise skin in Beta development it is sweet.

That is one slick lookin' skin. Props to you Smokehead. Nice Work.

Excellent skin Smoke! I'm pupin' a tent over this one!

Bug: In manual DVD Look up on the keyboard we seem to be missing the graphics for the arrow keys that allow left/right navigation of the DVD title. You can navigate to where the buttons should be and use them but they are invisible.

Also, the text at the bottom left corner of the "Get Thumb" screen is jumbled and unreadable.. Looks like to strings of text overlapping.

Great work!

TH

When I try to do the video calibration in 720p, 1080i, etc. the screen just turns black and I can't see the adjusting things. I can hear them move though, and I can back out of it just fine.

-Erich

Tested on 720x480 NTSC 4:3...

- When video calibration is selected it turns completely black.

- System Info runs outside of the box at the bottom of the screen.

- Not sure if its a bug. When playing music and you are at the home screen and press start for the OSD, it doesn't bring up the Now Playing w/ album art. It does when you are in Music, Videos, Settings, etc.

- Mark movie as "Watched"/"Un-watched" doesn't appear to have an effect on the cover art.

- File sizes and calculated space doesn't appear in My Files.

And I know text overlapping was mentioned before but Im gonna point out some of the spots that I noticed. Text overlapped in System Info - Hardware. Time and Date overlaps at the bottom of the home screen. And the scrolling text in "Movie Information" (as well as a few other spots in here) overlaps.

I am also having the same problem as ErichMoraga and gottastopdrinkin with the video calibration. But aside from that, this skin is great

Is it just for me that osd for time in videos aren't working. When I press the white button nothing happens, sliding with the right throttle doesn't work either. And to bug report the text with the xbmc version is outside of the bounding box in the xbmc info page.

Greatest skin yet though

This skin is a happy happy joy joy moment

the thing i love about this whole svn thing, is that smokehead is listening to the bug reports and updating the skin all the time. all you have to do is right click on the clearity svn folder and hit "update svn" and it will download all of the updated files and tell you what is new!

hey smokhead...

i´ll repeat what everybody said: great skin!

bug: trainer settings doesnt work. i think it´s just "invisible", because you jump to something, but you still see the games-list...

more bugs will posted soon

This is a sexy skin great job.

How do you access bookmarks?

Mediaportal is actually a port of XBMC to windows. They keep adding new features and it has a great tivo-like recording capability if you have a tv card.
http://www.team-mediaportal.com/

Smokehead, the skin looks amazing. I'm very much considering upgading my 2.0.1 build now to a more recent version..