Editing Skins

I've been using a skin called nHDpoppy that I really like, but on my CRT some of the fonts in some of the menus are much too small. There is also an obvious error in the channel selection menu where undefined variable names are displayed instead of the day of week and date.

So, I tranferred the folder containing the skins to my computer and opened up the skin.xml file in Kate took a look around. I fixed the date display error, increased the font sizes and display window sizes in certain menus, changed the fonts used in certain places and now I have a very nice interface that looks well on my 12 year old CRT TV.

I then did some web searching and found a program called e2skinner that makes it easier to visualize the results than editing text files.

I even was so bold as to go into the plugins folder of my e2 image and edit the Web Radio skin to increase the window and font size where the stream detail are so that it would look better on my screen.

Be careful when using a text editor, though, because a wrongly spelled word in the right place can cause the box to go into a reboot cycle, so keep a backup handy to ftp to the box in case this happens!

[As an aside, It's nice to have the ability to do this. There is one receiver I used to use regularly whose name shall remain nameless that has a display issue in a certain screen where important information is cut off, because the display window was too short and they tried to cram several things onto one line that should have been on separate lines. I mentioned this in a review on another site, but it has never been fixed. A simple skin issue that was done right in their competitor's model released two years earlier! If I had had the ability to edit its skin back then, I wouldn't even have mentioned it, here.]