[miguel254]

First, I need to say thank you for this mod.
Only I miss one thing, because I can´t see the status of a video outside Movies or TV Shows.

[toneman77]

just wanted to mention that I and everyone i "converted" to xbmc in the past months uses BIG Alaska exclusively.
Still my preferred skin (and i tried many)

thumbs up for your work

[odt_x]

Thanks for the update! And thanks for releasing the textures (was blind and didn't see them before) I've modded Hitchers Alaska revisited for large font and some other functionality and would like to also add some themes to it using the Mosaic textures. All for my own use so far

[oldpainless]

Hi,

Hope it's not been asked too many times (and I did try to find the answer)....

For the life of me I can't get cdart working. I d/l the newest package from the 1st post, got everything set up nice, tried just about everything, inc putting cdart.png in the music folders.

Any ideas?

Cheers

K

[TomPiXX]

I love this skin and use it at my CRT-TVs and Small TFT at work.

At home I use Alaska Revisited and there's one feature that I really miss. The "New" sign in the lower right corner of a cover / fanart in my movies.
Do you think you could write a mod for Alaska Revisited to add this feature?

[Amra]

I love this skin and use it at my CRT-TVs and Small TFT at work.

At home I use Alaska Revisited and there's one feature that I really miss. The "New" sign in the lower right corner of a cover / fanart in my movies.
Do you think you could write a mod for Alaska Revisited to add this feature?

Thank you for the compliments but I've pretty much stopped modding XBMC right now and that would be a pretty complicated addition to Revisited due to all the different views that would need changed. Sorry.

[mookan]

I think BIG Alaska is great, even on my 50 inch plasma. When the viewing distance is ~3 meters reading text from all other skins (that I've tested) is not as easy as I would like it to be.

Two thing though:
- How do I access "Advanced Options" for the subtitle addon? The option is not visible. Have to load another skin, change the settings and reload BIG Alaska.
- Is there an overlay for showing which movies/tv eps is considered to be watched? Can't find the setting for it. :S

[Amra]

I think BIG Alaska is great, even on my 50 inch plasma. When the viewing distance is ~3 meters reading text from all other skins (that I've tested) is not as easy as I would like it to be.

Two thing though:
- How do I access "Advanced Options" for the subtitle addon? The option is not visible. Have to load another skin, change the settings and reload BIG Alaska.
- Is there an overlay for showing which movies/tv eps is considered to be watched? Can't find the setting for it. :S

For the "watched" status of either movies or TV Shows, go into the Alaska settings & then the "Views" page and activate the "Show Movie Status" and "Show TV Status" options.

As for the Subtitle addon (and a few other addons I've noticed), I'm afraid I must be missing some xml code to access the Advanced Settings. Unfortunately, I don't think BIG Alaska is as up to date for XBMC as a lot of the other newer skins such as Alaska Revisited or Confluence so you will probably still need to drop into Confluence from time to time & then back to BIG Alaska. Sorry about that, but I need to find time to look into it IF I continue using this skin.

I've recently upgraded my TV (due to the untimely death of my old tube TV ) to a 40" Samsung 1080p LCD and am itching to either tweak Alaska Revisited (or the ReFocus skin, I like that a lot also) to my liking with some of my favorite views from BIG Alaska as well as bolder/more visible text in various areas or go in a totally different direction and create a new skin using Hitcher's Foundation skin (BIG Thanks to Hitcher for that & all his other hard work, if I haven't said it before). It's just a matter of finding the time...

[Livin]

Amra,
I'm working on porting Blue Slate theme to Revisited... i have most of it done and am using it now. MUCH easier to read the text but I'm still looking to make some of the text larger and some bolded. Trying to convince Hitcher to make this an option in Settings for users to turn on/off. Maybe you can also convince him?

Do you remember/know what text sizes you changed to make BIG Alaska? This would help me port text sizes to the new fonts.xml

[Amra]

Amra,
I'm working on porting Blue Slate theme to Revisited... i have most of it done and am using it now. MUCH easier to read the text but I'm still looking to make some of the text larger and some bolded. Trying to convince Hitcher to make this an option in Settings for users to turn on/off. Maybe you can also convince him?

Do you remember/know what text sizes you changed to make BIG Alaska? This would help me port text sizes to the new fonts.xml

Hey Livin, sorry I missed your message until now. In regards to what text sizes I changed, well, that's not so easy to say as I changed pretty much all of them from the title fonts to the plot fonts. Basically, if a font looked too small on my older TV, I would increase the font size anywhere from 2-4 pt sizes and then go thru all the code & bold various fonts where necessary. It really was a long & boring process. In case you haven't figured it out yet, bear in mind that anytime you change a font size it may screw up the formatting in Alaska Revisited so that maybe half the bottom line in some plot text will be cut off. In other words, change one thing & it may cause another to need changing. Doh!

On another note for anyone who is interested (or just bored beyond belief), I have gotten the itch back to do some XBMC skin modding and started working on a new skin. Hopefully, I will be able to see it all the way thru to the finish. I have a lot of admiration for Hitcher, McBorzu, Jezz_x, and anyone else who can produce these terrific skins. It's a LOT of work!

PS: Here's a sneak peek at the home screen so far...

[Hitcher]

Good to hear Amra and in case you missed it I've released a base skin that's ideal for starting a new one from -

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=94438

[Livin]

Amra,
Good to hear from you. I have most of the Themes done but have been having trouble figuring out some of the images/color markers, as the names are not usually very intuitive and/or are used in multiple ways it seems. I hope that Hitcher can spend a few minutes documenting the XML markers and/or answer my separate post and I can finish the themes.

your new skin looks nice, look forward to seeing it

[nvaia]

I have been using what I believe is called the fanart view. I noticed in some pics on this thread, that the fanart view shows plot info, as well as, extra fanart images.

1). How do I get the plot to show on this view?
2). How do I get extra fanart? Do I need to download images myself, off the web, and then insert them into and "extra fanart" folder in the movie folders?

Any help would be awesome.

Thanks

[Amra]

I have been using what I believe is called the fanart view. I noticed in some pics on this thread, that the fanart view shows plot info, as well as, extra fanart images.

1). How do I get the plot to show on this view?
2). How do I get extra fanart? Do I need to download images myself, off the web, and then insert them into and "extra fanart" folder in the movie folders?

Any help would be awesome.

Thanks

1). The normal (longer) plot appears to show for TV Shows but not Movies. Don't know why I did that but it does show the "Plot Outline" for Movies if you enable that option in the "BIG Alaska" settings screen. Bear in mind that I use Ember Media Manager to scrape my movies so I am not sure if the default XBMC scrapers will scrape for the Plot Outline or not. Try enabling the option I just mentioned to see if it works for you. If that still doesn't work for you then let me know & I will look at the code to see if there is a simble change that I can tell you to make.

2). To get extra thumbs, I use Ember & it works well. It will create a folder inside an individual Movie's folder titled "extrathumbs" and then within there it will add the jpeg images you select, naming them thumb1.jpg, thumb2.jpg, thumb3.jpg, etc, etc. The Fanart view code for movies looks specifically for thumb2.jpg and thumb3.jpg, it does not display thumb1.jpg since Ember will usually name the movie's primary fanart that.

Hope that helps and sorry if I am a little slow to respond. I've been working on a new skin and have been a little preoccupied with it lately.

[nvaia]

1). The normal (longer) plot appears to show for TV Shows but not Movies. Don't know why I did that but it does show the "Plot Outline" for Movies if you enable that option in the "BIG Alaska" settings screen. Bear in mind that I use Ember Media Manager to scrape my movies so I am not sure if the default XBMC scrapers will scrape for the Plot Outline or not. Try enabling the option I just mentioned to see if it works for you. If that still doesn't work for you then let me know & I will look at the code to see if there is a simble change that I can tell you to make.

2). To get extra thumbs, I use Ember & it works well. It will create a folder inside an individual Movie's folder titled "extrathumbs" and then within there it will add the jpeg images you select, naming them thumb1.jpg, thumb2.jpg, thumb3.jpg, etc, etc. The Fanart view code for movies looks specifically for thumb2.jpg and thumb3.jpg, it does not display thumb1.jpg since Ember will usually name the movie's primary fanart that.

Hope that helps and sorry if I am a little slow to respond. I've been working on a new skin and have been a little preoccupied with it lately.

Don't apologize. I'm sure you're busy with whatever it is that you do with yourself. Thank you for getting back to me though.

I willlet you know what happens with the plot outline and thank you for the extra fanart advice.

I appreciate it more than you know.