Skin choice
One of the great things about MediaPortal is the amount of different skins on offer. The default blue skin is a little plain, and almost a carbon copy of the Windows MCE skin. I wanted something that looked a little neater, and after some testing I settled upon “Revision”. XFace is one of the most popular skins and I might try it out at a later time, but I wanted something reasonably conventional to start off with. Revision works with the latest versions fine, and comes with XML files for lots of the plugins you might use, so everything looks pretty well integrated. Below is the preview for this skin…
One issue was that by default, MediaPortal gives a nice big warning if an out of date skin is being used - this is to remind you that bugs might occur due to the skin not being entirely correct for that release. This is fine, but it comes up every time and looks horrible!
Luckily there is a simple workaround; edit the “references.xml” file the skin uses, and amend the version to match the version of MediaPortal you have installed. Nice and easy.
