[lixx]

hi
in my holidays i tried to make a skin for xbmc.
it looks like this -> *klick*

i resized everything to 720*576, then i extracted the buttons and the background and edited the xml files, after that i uploaded it to my xbox. everything worked well, so far.
but some parts were "out of screen" and in the settings, i tried ui calibration but i was only able to change the position of the gui.

then i added a black border around the image -> *klick*
now it fits on my tv. but i'm not sure, if it looks identically on every tv? pal/ntsc, 4:3/16:9

btw do you like the skin?
in the center of the skin there are the icons of my movies, my music, etc..

sorry for my bad english  

edit:
i made a preview..
perhaps you can test it and put a notice in here, if it fits to your tv screen or not
download

[kraqh3d]

this has to do the televison overscan. as you already found out, the ui calibration only slides the image up and down, unlike the movie calibration which allows you to shrink the viewing area.

because the ui calibration only allows you to slide the image up and down, you have to manually shrink your skin to fit your tv. its annoying but it works. i just kept changing the resolution in my skin until i found the optimal resolution for my tv.

[floink]

when i made my skin, retro i started with a full (edit sorry don't know where i got those numbers) 720x576 background texture that looked good on the tv screen and then started adding elements and tested the skin on my tv continously to verify that everything fitted inside the overscan area on at least my tv.

i think there is no use in designing a full skin on the computer without testing it on the tv as everything looks a lot different on the tv. especially gradients and darkend areas.

/floink

[Gamester17]

remember that almost all tv's (at least if different brand) have a different degree of overscan, so use standard resolutions

[lixx]

hm, i thougt 720*576 is a standart resolution

for me it was important that it looks nice on my tv
first, it wasn't planned to make it public, but i posted some pics on irc and a lot of people said that it is very nice one.
but i don't know, how to do it better when i make it "fullscreen" the bar at the bottom is cut off on my tv.
it would be very nice, if the ui is scaleabele too, like the movie screen.

lixx

[Hullebulle]

the reason we decided not to make the ui scalable is that fonts and pics look ugly after the rescale. so the first thought was to have a seperate skin for each resolution, but that would mean that you have to find a skin that fits to your resolution or to create multiple versions for the skin designer.
then a guy came up with a tool to resize the skins (not the pics themself, but only the position of each control/pic).
this tool worked pretty well (thanks to the guy who wrote it again) and we decided to add the same way of recalculating the skin to xbmc itself.

[kraqh3d]

i dont think the xbmc auto scalar works, or atleast it doesnt work correctly. the default skins are all pal at 720x576. ive chosen an ntsc 4:3 resolution and i loose alot of the skin. thankfully all the controls are visibile, but for example, i only see the very top part of the large counter when playing an mp3. as a result, i had to use the skin scalar to make a custom resolution of 720x480 to get all the items to appear on my tv correctly.

[Gamester17]

hm, i thougt 720*576 is a standart resolution

it is, my comment was meant for floink who posted a non standard resolution above, see that he changed his post after

[lixx]

new version: *download*

i fixed some things, like the messed up fonts, the label color of disabled buttons, and the my music screen..


mfg lixx

[Hullebulle]

sweet. its getting better and better. five little things i noticed:

1. i would edit the reboot/reset/dash button on the mainsreen a bit to get it flashing

2. the three pics (audio/video/subtitle) for the osd (press the little black button while watching a movie) are missing.
same for the little arrow in the sliders.

3. the small movie window boarder (start a movie and switch back to the gui with x) still is blue like in the default skin.

4. this may depend on your offset issues. the selectionbar is a bit to short for me (my tv). on mp3s the durationand for movies the size info doesn't fit complet into the bar.

5. again related to your (my) tv offset. you resized the background image to make it fit on your screen, but i have a black frame around the background now (this isn't realy important, i first noticed it in the ui calibrating screen, else i wouldn't).

but these are only minor things. keep up the nice work.