Changing the skin for xine-ui

anton123 · Posted: Thu Jan 04, 2007 10:10 pm Post subject: Changing the skin for xine-ui

Hi all,

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

I am living a mystical experience at the moment and that was the case for more than a week. I don't know how and from where I got the knowledge to change the skin for the xine-ui media player front end. Somehow I was able to get the window called Skin Chooser to pop up and to select a skin to add besides the existing one called xinetic. Now, my mind is absolutely blank.. I can no longer do that, I don't even know where and how to get that knowledge back. It vanished just as it arrived. I heard that pressing Ctrl +D would bring that window up but nothing happens. Can someone please, remind me how to change skins for the xine-ui front end?

Thank you

BitJam · Posted: Thu Jan 04, 2007 10:55 pm Post subject:

The skin browser is in the control window which can be opened with alt-c. The keymap is available in ~/.xine/keymap.

anton123 · Posted: Thu Jan 04, 2007 11:09 pm Post subject:

Hehehe...

I wish it were that simple but that is what is pathological; there is absolutely no button to allow me to open up the Skin Chooser window and nothing about the word "skin" or similar in the keymap file. All I see in the window when pressing Alt + C is only a skin called "xinetic". But how do I get the window called Skin Chooser to pop up? That one lists all available skins at the web location and allows one to download a chosen skin locally. Then, naturally, the selected skin is listed besides "xinetic" in the window accessed by pressing Alt + C. Somehow I was able to get to that window with my eyes closed but now I have no idea how to redo it. I forgot, I was temporarily hijacked, I don't know where I got the knowledge of how to do it only to forget it.

From http://www.softpedia.com/reviews/linux/xine-Review-18500.shtml

"The interface is fully skinable. And it gets even better! If you want to apply other themes you don't have to go through a meticulous process to use a new theme. All you have to do is press Ctrl+D and a window that displays the available skins on the official website appears. It provides a preview of the skins and if you like it, go ahead and click the Load button. In the OSD is displayed the process of the download. This is rare functionality and really does the trick."

Yes, but Ctrl +D does not make the trick for me and that is not what I even used to get that bastard window to pop up!

BitJam · Posted: Thu Jan 04, 2007 11:57 pm Post subject:

Ctrl-d works for me for opening up the skin download window.

You can download specific skins from: http://xinehq.de/index.php/skins

I downloaded a tarball that contained all the skins but I can't find it in Google right now. Maybe it was an rpm file that I downloaded. You could take a look for that.

Once you download some skins and put them into the proper directory, you can choose which skin to use with the control panel which is available by alt-c.

anton123 · Posted: Fri Jan 05, 2007 1:39 am Post subject:

Hey BitJam,

Thanks a lot for the help. I am not sure if that is the procedure (Ctrl + D) that I used to in order to access the Skin Chooser window. Is there another option somewhere wrtitten in the Settings -> Setup... window? I can not identify any. Nevertheless, looking at the "keymap" file, I am confused as to which option to search (there is no Ctrl +D text in that file it seems). So, is there a way to go about this file? By the way, just thinking about maybe keyboard layout playing a role here but unsure at this stage. Here is some info from xorg.conf:

Section "InputDevice"

Identifier "Keyboard1"
Driver "kbd"

(lots of comments here with #)

Option "XkbRules" "xorg"
Option "XkbModel" "pc104"
Option "XkbLayout" "us"

EndSection

BitJam · Posted: Fri Jan 05, 2007 1:47 am Post subject:

Here is the SkinDownload section of my keymap file:

anton123 · Posted: Fri Jan 05, 2007 2:50 am Post subject:

A quick search gives:

* net-misc/curl
Latest version available: 7.15.1-r1
Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ]
Size of files: 1,404 kB
Homepage: http://curl.haxx.se/
Description: A Client that groks URLs
License: MIT X11

From: http://freshmeat.net/projects/xine/?branch_id=35039&release_id=111253

"And for the eye candy fans, the skin downloader (launched by pressing Ctrl+d, if xine-ui was compiled with libcurl support) has a preview function. In addition to all this, there have been some bugfixes."

Could that be the issue?

BitJam · Posted: Fri Jan 05, 2007 3:07 am Post subject:

Yes, I think you found the problem. You probably want to re-emerge xine-ui with the curl USE flag. On the other hand, if you were able to get it to work before perhaps you already had the curl USE flag enabled. You can check with:

anton123 · Posted: Fri Jan 05, 2007 3:15 am Post subject:

SOLVED:

Emerging curl-7.15.1-r1 resolves the issue and Ctrl + d (small 'd') brings up the skin chooser window with skin previews so, download and installation of skins is possible.

To BitJam:

Actually, I did an "emerge --pretend openoffice" because I did not install it and I thought that I could see it in its dependencies, and there it was. When I was installing openoffice from live cd it was implicitly installedl.
I do not emerge xine-ui or xine-lib but instead I compile them with:

xine-lib:

./configure --prefix=/usr CFLAGS="-march=athlon-xp -O2 -pipe -msse2"
make
make install

xine-ui:

./configure --prefix=/usr --disable-xft CFLAGS="-march=athlon-xp -O2 -pipe -msse2"
make make install

because I find that the emerged xine-lib is severely limited in functionality (ex: can not play live internet streams in MP4 AAC format).
The final compilation I save as a tar.bz2 archive and I have it around for when I need to uninstall/reinstall both packages from the comand line. So, I do not complicate myself with portage in this respect.

Thank you all for the support.