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Showing posts with label Aeon MQ5. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Aeon MQ5. Show all posts

Saturday, 15 February 2014

Three custom themes for Aeon MQ5 Skin created by CW-KID

One of the great features of the Aeon MQ5 skin for XBMC is you can create your own custom themes. Themes are basically the background images that get displayed in the various areas of the XBMC user interface.

I have created three themes in Red, Blue and Purple colour tones, I spent a considerable amount of time putting these three themes together, searching the Internet for just the right images. All images are 1920x1080 or 1280x720 in size.

There are too many images in each theme to demo all of them, but below are a some sample screen shots of the main menu areas. Note there is more than one image for each menu item most have five images which will alternate.

Red tones theme:

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Blue tones theme:

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Purple tone theme:

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Installing the themes

You can download each theme from my Dropbox.

Red tones

Blue tones

Purple tones

Once you have downloaded each .rar file extract them in to the Userdata\addon_data\skin.aeonmq5.extrapack folder on your XBMC PC(s). If you don’t have this folder you need to install the Aeon MQ5 Extra Pack first.

In the screen shot below you can see the three new folders.

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Each custom theme folder contains 21 sub folders as you can see in the screen shot below. Each sub folder contains the various background images.

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Now you need to turn on the desired theme in the Aeon MQ5 skin.

Go to Settings – Skin Settings

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Select Themes from the menu on the left and scroll down on the right to select My Theme and turn it on.

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You will then see a screen like this, which gives you the instructions on how to create your own theme. Just select back to get out of this.

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Next you need to select the path of where your custom theme is located, browse to the folder Userdata\addon_data\skin.aeonmq5.extrapack and then select either the Red, Blue or Purple theme. I will select the Blue one in this example.

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Then select OK

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The blue theme should then be enable and you can see the path to the themes folder

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To change it to the Red or Purple themes just do the same as above but choose the correct folder for the desired theme.

Summary

I hope you enjoy these themes as they took me about three days to put them together!

Saturday, 23 November 2013

XBMC Aeon MQ5 Skin – A look at the Music and Concerts Libraries

I’m moving from the XBMC skin Aeon MQ4 to Aeon MQ5 at the moment. I’ve already written about the Aeon MQ5 Movie library here and the TV Shows library here. Today I am going to be looking at the Music and Concerts libraries. You can see my previous post on the Aeon MQ4 Music library here for comparison.

XBMC Main Menu - Music

Music Playback whilst on the XBMC main music menu.

Here you can see the new Skin Widgets / Recently Added albums just above the main menu, in MQ4 these were hidden away more on the top menu. Next Tracks is also a new feature.

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If I select an album from the Skin Widgets, you can see that the entire main menu now displays the name of the album you currently have highlighted which I really like. You can just click OK to start the playback of this album from the list of Recently Added albums etc.

Also new is the partial spinning disc that can be seen in the bottom left hand corner.

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New main menu / sub-menu (smart menu)

Music Recently Played / Music Recently Added / Music Video Clips (doesn’t work) / Music Genres / Music Playlists / Music Artists / Music Albums / Music Tracks / Music Files / Music Party-Mode / Music Compilations / Music Top-100 / Music Clean Library / Music Update Library / Search

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I am very happy to report that now with the completely new menu customisation feature of Aeon MQ5, it is now possible to change to the main Music menu item so that when selected it will always launch in to the
Music-Albums section. This was not possible before in Aeon MQ4.

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Music Genres

Custom / Alternative Music Genre icons and backgrounds in the new Right List view!

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Music Playback Full Screen

The music playback in full screen has been greatly improved with some new features and looks awesome!
Mosaic slideshow + Viewing (VIZ) with Lyrics

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Next Tracks is a new feature, it shows which tracks are up next and you can even select the tracks from this full-screen and start playback of them which is very nice indeed.

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Music Recently Played – In Poster view

Aeon MQ5 makes much better use of the clearart artist logo images and where it displays them.

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Music Albums – Wall view

By default in Aeon MQ5 the wall views scroll up / down instead of from left / right as in Aeon MQ4.

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Album Information

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Music Artists – Right List view

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Artist Information

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Music Compilations – Wall view

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Music Albums – Low List view

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Music Albums – Panel view

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Music Albums – Coverflow view

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Music Videos / Concerts

I have a few music concerts on DVD that I ripped, however most of these are single Music Video files I downloaded from the Internet. XBMC isn’t very good at adding music videos in to the library. The default scraper for Music Videos is TheAudioDB.com but I found it did not detect over half of my music videos. So I took the time to manually download a poster and fanart image and to manually create a .nfo meta-data file and then had XBMC import my music videos in to its Concerts library.

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Using the Skin Widgets – Recently Added Music Videos

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Music Concerts Library – Shelf view

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Music Concert / Video Information

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Music Concerts / Videos Playback

Music Video Playback with information overlay. Note the media info icons are displayed at the bottom. Starring is empty probably something to do with my .nfo meta-data text file having a missing field.

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Music Video Playback – When skipping / pausing playback etc you can see the progress bar in the bottom left hand corner and the Current Time / Remaining Time and Ends At which is a nice feature not in MCE.

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Transport Controls / Playback menu

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Summary

There are some nice new features with the Music library and music playback in Aeon MQ5. Overall the Aeon MQ5 is a worthy upgrade to the previous Aeon MQ4 skin.







www.phaze1digital.com