I'm just trying to modify the default skin a bit - bigger fonts mostly. I'm playing with the videos list and I've got the bigger fonts and wider listview but I can't seem to figure out how to shrink the cover art viewing area, mostly because I don't know which part of the XML file describes it.
Is there a faq somewhere that says what the different elements are for? I figured out the three folder/item views for the most part but the rest is evading me.
Sorry, there is no documentation that describes each of the elements. Most of it's pretty straight forward though.
Which cover art are you talking about exactly though? There is a few different places in the app that show it. If you post a screen shot of the cover art you want to change, I'll point you in the right direction.
Basically I want to shrink the black preview area to leave more room for the listview entries. I find changing "default" to 20 point makes the list visible from across the room (old folks here 8). At 20 point the text descriptions aren't showing enough so I widened the listview but that overlaps the black preview area. The attachment doesn't have the listview widened, just the larger font set in global.
Eventually I want to make the listview items taller and wider for readability.
Normally I just look at existing code and google to figure things out but I'm having a hard time getting started with this.
These changes would be in C:\Users\Public\NPVR\Skin\Default\Videos\videos.xm l
To reduced the size of the box used for displaying metadata and cover art you'd want move the ListSelectionMetaData element further right, and decrease it's width by changing these highlighted values:
If you wanted to increase the height of each row, you'd need to also increase the 4.64 to something bigger. To do this though, you'd also need to decrease the number of visible rows:
<Element name="ListView" location="0,12.36" size="100,75.28" alpha="255" alphaFade="true" visibleRows="14">
Backup whatever changes you make though, because they'll be overwritten next time you upgrade the software.
What rule does the NPVR installer follow regarding things like modified skin files? Always overwrite? Meaning make sure you have backups of anything locally modified before updating?
Yes, it should overwrite any modified files, so as mentioned above - you'd need to backup these types of changes. The only files that get special treatment are config.xml and npvr.db3.
PatM: it may pay to have a look at this visibility enhanced skin (link below) that I dev'ed a while back even if it's only as a comparison for modifying your own skin
I grabbed that one already Jaggy. Going to look at it for the TV guide as I can't see how to change the actual TV Show font and reduce the number of hours shown. I would have had at it already but the power was out for several hours - big windstorm here.