Aeon "Stark" BEAUTIFUL XBMC skin

[QueBert]

It's supposed to come out on the 30th. My jaw dropped when I saw this, I've been using XBMC for maybe a year or so now and this made my jaw drop.
It might be too flashy for some, but shhhhiiiiit I love it. I watched the video 3 times drooling lol.

linky to video of it in action


Moviepostersdb.com has a crazy selection of 1080p backdrops, even thou they charge for access it's not too expensive. I think I might have to shell out a few bucks to get some credits on there so I can have some super suck hi-res fanart.

 

[Kaido]

Man, I love it! Any idea if this works with the Mac port, Plex?

 

[QueBert]

Originally posted by: Kaido
Man, I love it! Any idea if this works with the Mac port, Plex?

Well ONE person who might or might not be accurate said there are some changes in the newer XBMC source that Stark uses which aren't in Plex yet. Now if he's correct it might work but not look right. I would assume depending on how far behind XBMC Plex is it should work sooner than later. Of course I've never used Plex and my impression about it is they keep somewhat up on the XBMC source and it's not a project that's going in it's own direction.

You can try it on the 30th, worst that will happen is it won't work. I know I'm going to be d/ling it the second he releases it. I'm starting to try to get all my crappy 720p, or even lower resolution backdrops up to speed. If I had the skin right now I would RUIN it's beauty with my horribly crappy fanart That site I linked to has some sweeeet 1080 art, a lot of the movie posters on there have no text so they will be perfect for fanart.

 

[dwell]

Will try it out. Boxee kind of trumped XBMC for me. I hate relying on scripts for things like trailers, Hulu. Boxee is much more integrated, but that skin is really nice for XBMC.

 

[aphex]

Beautiful job!

 

[RedCOMET]

I use this skin when i use XBMC on my PC. The alpha 1.4 version is awesome. I downloaded a few 1080 pictures and it looks awesome on the projector.

 

[QueBert]

Originally posted by: RedCOMET
I use this skin when i use XBMC on my PC. The alpha 1.4 version is awesome. I downloaded a few 1080 pictures and it looks awesome on the projector.

you mean regular Aeon right? I thought Stark wasn't even out to beta testers until Friday. I like the original, but for whatever reason I use Mediastream. I think I'll be switching to Stark full time, only thing I'm not sure is if it will have any wall or info views. I like eye candy but I like info about the movies to come up too

 

[JackBurton]

VERY nice and clean.

 

[skulkingghost]

LOVE IT will definitely install it when it comes out.

 

[BoberFett]

Very cool. I've tried several skins and keep coming back to PM3, but this does look excellent.

 

[dwell]

So... Is it out of what?

 

[Tegeril]

Wow that is beautiful.

 

[RedCOMET]

Originally posted by: QueBert

Originally posted by: RedCOMET
I use this skin when i use XBMC on my PC. The alpha 1.4 version is awesome. I downloaded a few 1080 pictures and it looks awesome on the projector.

you mean regular Aeon right? I thought Stark wasn't even out to beta testers until Friday. I like the original, but for whatever reason I use Mediastream. I think I'll be switching to Stark full time, only thing I'm not sure is if it will have any wall or info views. I like eye candy but I like info about the movies to come up too

Q,

Yes, the regular Aeon skin. The download i have is called"Aeon_Alpha14.zip." I downloaded that back in Dec '08.

Oddly enough, I usually don't have XMBC running full time on my HTPC. I watch a lot of hulu.com, and having xbmc up and running gets in the way of watching hulu.

Also, I do find, that if i decompress (right?) the hi res jpg to bmp, they tend to have a smoother transition from one picture to the next.

 

[Tegeril]

Not really a decompress. Just a conversion. Takes the lossy data in its existing condition and converts it to a different storage medium that is no longer lossy. Quality is not regained but will not be lost further.

 

[QueBert]

XBMC operates much smoother with BMP instead of JPG's, especially for 1080p stuff. BTW Stark .9 has been released, the download link is on XBMC's fourm under the skins/aeon section. Apparently 1.0 will be out in a few weeks and .9 is a public beta of sorts. It's missing the fully functional TV section and has some small bugs here and there. I think it's lacking the file section too. But it's worth checking out. I'm gone for the weekend so alas I cannot install and test it. But I will be as soon as I'm back home

RedCOMET - XBMC has a plugin called External Player for lauching external programs seamlessly from XBMC. There should be a way to get it to launch Hulu without any issues. I have yet to try it but I will also be trying this. Got my IR receiver and plan to learn EventGhost and see what I can do to this HTPC I'm building for a friend.

 

[dwell]

Installed Stark .9. Very nice. It looks like the coverflow is kind of busted. I will have to spend some more time with it to configure to see if I would replace Boxee with it, but Boxee still wins for simplicity and integration of web video feeds.

 

[RedCOMET]

Originally posted by: QueBert
XBMC operates much smoother with BMP instead of JPG's, especially for 1080p stuff. BTW Stark .9 has been released, the download link is on XBMC's fourm under the skins/aeon section. Apparently 1.0 will be out in a few weeks and .9 is a public beta of sorts. It's missing the fully functional TV section and has some small bugs here and there. I think it's lacking the file section too. But it's worth checking out. I'm gone for the weekend so alas I cannot install and test it. But I will be as soon as I'm back home

RedCOMET - XBMC has a plugin called External Player for lauching external programs seamlessly from XBMC. There should be a way to get it to launch Hulu without any issues. I have yet to try it but I will also be trying this. Got my IR receiver and plan to learn EventGhost and see what I can do to this HTPC I'm building for a friend.

Q,

External player, eh? I'll look into that when i get home from work in another week and half. I do recall there being a Hulu script available on the xmbc forums. If i remember correctly, the forum post for the thread said it didn't always work.

Thanks for the heads up on the External Player plugin. Let me know your results from testing it, too.

Chris,
The last I checked, boxee wasn't really available for windows. Has that changed? I thought boxee was geared more towards linux, etc systems, with windows port kinda secondary.

 

[QueBert]

Just finished setting up my friends HTPC. XBMC + Stark + 52" Sony XBR = win. Crap this thing looks sweeeeeet on his screen. With the 1080p backdrop pack the author also put out it's pure eye candy. Pretty functional too, I can't wait for the 1.0 release.

 

[The Boston Dangler]

this is pretty good. with all defaults i got basic functionality with a di novo edge and imon remote. xbmc is having some fits at any thing over 720 16:9, windowed or fullscreen. aeon seems to missing a mouse cursor graphic, and the mouse is pretty flaky altogether.
is this normal? i'm new to this program

xbmc for windows 8.1, djh-aeon-dd3e208c6f8ded05c3ea9c337be241a6a3805376, Aeon_Fonts
vista 64 sp1
2x 9600gt, latest driver
1920x1080p panasonic

 

[QueBert]

the author purposely left out the mouse cursor, he claims his skin was no designed to be used with a mouse so he refuses to have any support for it. You said you're new to it, I would suggest downloading Eventghost, you can remap all the buttons on the imon with it. And it has a XBMC plugin so you can see what macros are available to map your buttons to.

Basically you load EG, load the XBMC plugin, add a macro from a list - let's say you want to map a button to page up, you select the macro, then press whatever button you want it to use, it pops up in EG and you drag it to the macro and BOOM - mapped. Sounds kind of complex maybe, but once you get use to it, it's easy as hell. Not sure how many buttons that remote has, but you should be able to pretty easily map all the important buttons. And out of the box MCE remotes have all the basic functionality. I like to add a button for Party Mode (random music playlist) and a few others.

I also suggest you get his backdrop packs, he has a great collection of very high quality images for movies, tv, music artists and general pictures.

 

[The Boston Dangler]

hmmmm it works fine with vista aero turned off. at least that gives me something to work with

 

[FrustratedUser]

Very Nice.

 

[The Boston Dangler]

any idea why xbmc doesn't remember any directories?

 

[QueBert]

The Boston Dangler - which version of XBMC & which OS? mine remembers everything fine. I would try a SVN build, there's a sticky in the XBMC forums in the Windows part. I would stay away from the 9.04 Alpha and stick with the latest SVN. Aside from that, you could try running it with the -p switch, which will save all your user info to the the install dir and not /users/appdata/xbmc or /documents and settings/user/application data/xbmc (depending on your OS)

at first it's kind of confusing, but what I do is go into VIDEOS, add my movie folder, then I bring up the on screen menu and set content type as movies, you can set the scrapping options however you want. Then go back and select "scan to library" not sure which keyboard key it is, but you can right click with the mouse. to get to the context menu up. Music you don't need to set a content type. Do the same for TV shows if you have any. Just to make it easier I have it set up to scan library for changes on startup. Dunno if I'm not doing something right, but I always have had to manually scan to library the first time to get them to show up. After that it auto detects any new media I've added since the last time when I start up XBMC.

After you've scanned your files in you can chose to switch to library mode, some people like file mode. If your media is named properly, while scrapping, the movies cover + fan art should come up. You can configure how you name your files, but I suggest something simple. l"The Dark Knight (2008).mkv" works without editing any XML. putting the year will get better results if there happens to be more than 1 movie with the same name from different years. You can also put each movie in it's own folder 'The Dark Knight (2008)' for example, and tell the scrapper to look up the movie based off the folder.

 

[jtvang125]

Ok, I'm currently using the latest version of MediaBrowser. I've heard of XBMC before but never looked much into it so I'm pretty much a noob on it. Just a few questions:

1. Does XBMC run on Windows or do I need an XBox? If it runs on Windows do I need a version with Media Center?
2. How hard would the transistion be to move my current setup over to XBMC? I have 10 HDD and each has a main Movies folder in the root. The movies are then in their own folder within this Movies folder. Each movie has a folder.jpg (cover pic) and backdrop.jpg.