According to our latest poll, the XBMC is the most popular media center among the readers of My Media Experience. To help you to enhance the XBMC media center even further, I will share with you three practical tips that I have implemented on my XBMC Dharma Live Linux.
Aeon skins have been the most stylish skins available on the XBMC, but unfortunately the Aeon skins tested on my NVIDIA ION based HTPC were too sluggish and slow.
Finally, I have found an Aeon skin that looks stunning and still works fast on my computer. This skin is called Aeon Nox.
You can download this skin here and install it to your .xbmc/addons folder.
Have a look at the YouTube video by layer0730 below to see how the Aeon Nox skin looks like in practice.
If you do not need Add-ons and Programs folders in the home window, you can hide them to make your home menu look less crowded. Go to “System – Skin – Home window options” to hide Add-ons and Programs folders.
Additional note: Make sure that you have disabled “Enable Background Effect” setting as it will increase CPU usage quite heavily.
If you have not use the favorites folder before, I would definately recommend adding your most used folders and addons as favorites to access them quickly from the home menu.
You can take using favorites even further by enabling the Favorites Shortcuts option in the “System – Skin” menu. After you have added a folder or add-on as a favorite, you can add this favorite to your home menu. Simply enter a button label and set the favorite path and you are ready to go.
Important note: I had an issue with the Aeon Nox skin at first due to my live TV script I had installed earlier. If I stop and start XBMC Live Linux I got a black screen. The cause for freezing was the next aired script. You can delete the line in startup.xml in 720p folder of skin.aeon.nox that calls the next aired script on startup. However, this issue should not exist on fresh compilations of XBMC.
Did you know that you can launch Firefox directly from XBMC? Follow this step by step guide to install Firefox browser to XBMC Live Linux.