Metro or Media Center style
#1
I've been looking into Kodi/XBMC for running a media center PC, and I like a lot of its features, but the interface is a bit confusing for me, regardless of skin. Is there a Metro or Windows 7 Media Center - style interface available that makes everything incredibly easy to use?

I know exactly what I want the media player to do, but it's just hard for me to navigate many of the XBMC skins.

For me, I'd like to see XBMC open, and present me pivots across the top for home, tv, movies, music, games, books, social, and settings. Under each pivot, overview what's new, unviewed, top shows or episodes, what my friends are watching, that kind of thing. Then, say I go to TV pivot, and it shows me a DVD-cover style sorted alphabetically, where there are sub-pivots for title, genre, airdate, year, rating, station, and cast+crew so I can go find all my sci-fi or all stuff that was aired today, or everything that has Chris Pratt in it. Ditto Movies; music would have album, artist, genre, release date, and playlists; games would let me view all my ROMs by title, system, year, or genre. I could right-click on anything to edit its metadata, or assign subtitles to video files, or force a re-check of metadata if I think it's wrong. It'd take remote control input from a media center remote, and use the color buttons to go to tv, movies, music, or games, and use the # buttons as T9 so if I typed 223, it would accept anything [abc][abc][def] so a TV show with 'bad' or 'baf' could show up in search results.

Apologies for the paragraph above, it might be a bit of a ramble. But I like the idea of XBMC, but the implementation seems a bit...not-user-friendly. I build my own computers, so technology isn't my problem. I know how to make good interfaces, but not how to program them.
Reply
#2
Check out xperience1080 skin.
Reply
#3
I just found it not 5-10 minutes ago. Thanks!!

How does one go about coding a skin? I like it, but want to put in a few tweaks of my own to make it more 'zune.'
Reply
#4
http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=XBMC_Skinning_Manual
Arctic Fuse - Alpha now available. Support me on Ko-fi.
Reply
#5
Maybe if I lay out a bit more of what I'm looking for, that'll help.

Main interface: like WMC on Windows 7 - vertical text, horizontal picture-like sub-categories

Items in the interface:

Music [albums][artists][songs][playlists][music videos]
TV [TV Library][Internet TV]
Movies [Movie Library]
Weather[Now][5-day][hourly]
RSS [US][World][Entertainment][etc]
Settings[Metadata][App Settings][etc]

In Music, click Albums:
-along the top are the other pivots (Albums, Artists, etc)
-you see an alphabetized list of albums by album title; jumplist letter at the top, scroll vertically through a single letter, horizontally to go through the letters
-if you click on Artist, you'll see something that looks similar to the Zune Desktop artist view (artist background image, list of albums along the bottom, pivots top-right for bio, videos, pictures, etc)

In TV, click TV Library
-along the top are pivots: Series, Airdate, Aired Today, Genre, Year, People (see your shows by the actors/actresses)
-you can view TV shows by DVD cover; when viewing a single series, along the left, are banners showing your other series so you can quickly access them.
-there are buttons to play series; within a season, to play season (A playlist of all the videos within that season)), and also 'add to playlist' options to create your own video playlists
-the app will let me choose new DVD covers from the several available on theTVDB.com

In Movies, click Movie Library
-along the top are the pivots: Title, Genre, Release Date, Year, People
-viewed by DVD cover. Click on a movie to view details with a button to add to playlist, or click Play while a movie is highlighted to play instantly

That's a rough idea.
Reply

Logout Mark Read Team Forum Stats Members Help
Metro or Media Center style0