[kraqh3d]

it seems all the skins are designed for pal (720x576). i'm running in ntsc 4:3 so i really only have a screen resolution of 720x480 assuming no overscan.

how does xbmc scale the skin to the chosen screen resolution? which control properties are altered?

so you know, on my tv, the default thumbpanel only shows 2 rows of icons. looking at the default thumbpanel in references.xml, it looks like it should be able to show 3. (i hope i calculated this correctly by dividing the height of 420, by the itemheigh of 115.) i'm assuming the discrepency is due to the scaling factor used to "squish" the pal skin into my ntsc.

[kraqh3d]

no one wants to explain the actual mechanics behind what gets scaled depending on screen resolution?

no matter, i sorta worked it out by trial and error. if any other ntsc users want their thumbpanel to show three rows, do this...

in references.xml, change the height of the default thumbpanel to 432. this is the easy part. you'll get three rows, but the bottom row will overlap the object counter, and the page up/dn controls.

to really get it to fit, you need to modify all the myblahblah.xml files. i ended up moving the page title up a bit, the thumbpanel up a bit, the object counter down a bit, and the page up/dn controls down a bit.