I am in the process of moving over from Media Portal and have experienced a problem with skins. I have a Windows 8.1 machine which I installed as a test case and everything went fine. However, when I installed XBMC on my Windows 7-based HTPC and looked to install another skin all the skins come back as being "Incompatible". When I look further they all say that a "dependency" is not being met and to contact the author of the skin (which would mean all the authors). There is not much other detail as to what "dependency" is not being met. My top level specs are a Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit system, Core i5 @ 3.4GHz with 8 Gb of RAM. My graphics card is a AMD Radeon 5450 (a little older but has always done a great job with HD playback). Thanks. ejb
I'd suggest doing another clean install on your Windows-7 system. Run xbmc but don't do anything for 5 minutes.Then try downloading another skin and see if that works.
Force refresh the xbmc repo
Thanks for the suggestions. I kind of did both in a different path. What I did was uninstall and clean reinstall XBMC on both machines (Windows 7 and Windows 8). Again I had the problem with the Windows 7 install (but not on Windows 8 machine). So I turned the debugging log on and tried to install a skin from a zip file (Black Glass, BTW). What it told me was that the install program could not access the proper skins.shortcuts file. Hmmm - so it looked like something was wrong in how the W7 machine was interfacing to the repository. My solution was to just copy all the data directories and files from the W8 machine (both in the Program Folder and AppData paths minus the executables) onto the W7 machine and "presto" everything works perfectly. I can download skins, add-ons, etc. I am not quite sure what went wrong but it seems to work fine now. I am now enjoying XBMC (vice Media Portal) and loving the Black Glass skin (which TGX moved over from MP). Thank you again. ejb