Creating your Own Kodi build Part Eight
Welcome to Creating your own Kodi build Part Eight. This handy series will give you all the steps you need to make your own Kodi build.
Part One of this series can be found HERE
Part Two of this series can be found HERE
Part Three of this series can be found HERE
Part Four of this series can be found HERE
Part Five of this series can be found HERE
Part Six of this series can be found HERE
Part Seven of this series can be found HERE
Customisation.
Well here we are at the customisation stage. I hope you are all regular visitors to Bestforkodi.com by now.
The features covered now are slightly more advanced but believe me, if I can do it, then so can you. As always I will try to show you every step along the way.
I am going to start today by covering 2 items.
1: Changing the font and size of our Main Menu and Sub-Menu items.
2: Changing the Main Menu so it displays only one item. This will allow us to add some cool images to it later in the series.
A big thanks to fellow blogger Ezzerman for his great Back2Basics articles, these have helped me enormously, and to “kodi master” @DickoTheGeordie for his tutorial videos.
So let’s start by changing some fonts.
The first thing to do is to find some fonts online that you like the look of and think will work well with the build.
As recommended by Ezzerman, I used the website “1001freefonts”
Make sure the fonts you choose are available in .tff format ( Type Font File ). Here you can see I am downloading the .tff file for the font “Good Times Regular”.
I chose and downloaded 3 fonts in the end and here they are in my Downloads folder.
Before doing anything else, a good tip now is to rename the files to a shorter name, this just makes things a bit easier and less chance of making a mistake. Right click on the files and rename them.
Now we have some nice short file names it’s time to transfer them to our kodi system. I just copied them onto a USB stick then stuck that into my T8 box.
Now place the files in the following folder, this is where other font files are kept.
Android/data/org.xbmc.kodi/files/kodi/addons/skin.aeon.nox.5/fonts
Now they are in here we can use them on our kodi system and in the build, but in order to do that we need to venture into “xml” files. Please only do this if you are confident and make sure you have a backup of your system just in case. Check out my previous blog on doing backups.
OK, this is our target file.
Android/ data/org.xbmc.kodi/files/kodi/addons/skin.aeon.nox.5/1080i/font.xml
For big changes I might chose to copy this file onto my USB stick and take it to the PC to make the changes but in this case we are only making a few tweaks so I will do it direct on my T8 box using File Manager.
If we click on the Fonts.xml file we get a few options on how we want to open it, this depends on what Apps you have on your box.
I will chose to open it with File Manager which I am using to get to this path and I will opt to use this method only once.
Once inside we need to find the places that need tweaking.
We need to look for the <font> description for the Main Menu which can be found on or about line 247. In File Manager you don’t get to see the line numbers so you need to find it manually.
Replace the existing .tff file name with the one of your choice, I have done it already above. You see now why we made the file name nice and short. Less chance of any mistakes.
Those of you that are eagle eyed will notice that I have also changed the size of the font in this section too. This just makes this particular font fit my main menu bar much better. A lot of this is just trial and error, don’t be afraid to play with it a bit to get it how you want it.
Now, while we are in this file, let’s do the sub-menu text as well.
We need to scroll up in this file a bit to find the <font> description for font13_title. You will find this on approximately line 144. Be careful if you don’t have line numbers because there are a few <font> descriptions that are very similar.
Once again, change the .tff file name and if necessary the size also to the font you chose earlier. I have changed mine above.
Remember to save the file before exiting and that’s it.
You must re-start kodi for the changes to take effect.
Here’s what mine looks like now !
OK, with that done, let’s now make an edit to the main menu bar so that it only displays one item at a time.
As mentioned in earlier blogs we have the choice within the kodi menus to change between 3 and 5 items but we have to make a tweak if we only want one.
Thanks go to @DickoTheGeordie for his great Youtube video guides on this one.
Having just one main menu item leaves us with plenty of space on the bar to add some cool images or graphics which I will cover in later blogs (once I have learned how to do it).
So, in file manager again, let’s navigate to this folder:
Android/ data/org.xbmc.kodi/files/kodi/addons/skin.aeon.nox.5/1080i
Once inside, locate the Includes_home. xml file.
Open this file, it looks like this.
The changes we are going to make in here are right at the top of the file.
I am going to change the width from its default setting of 2800 to 600 and the left setting from its default of -290 to 1000.
I also changed the Focus Position figures of 4 & 2 to 0 & 0, this keeps the sub-menu and main-menu items aligned when scrolling through one item at a time.
As with the size of the fonts, you may have to experiment a little with these figures to get the desired effect.
These figures of 600 and 1000 took me a few attempts to get right.
Again, save the file before exiting and re-start kodi.
You should now have something like this.
A blank main menu canvas….
That’s enough for this blog, I hope you have some fun with it.
Don’t worry, editing these type of files will become second nature soon. That’s what I keep telling myself anyway !
In the meantime, any questions please contact me on Twitter @Grendel1905 or @Besforkodi
Keep dabbling
