Geexbox - Linux Media Center

Overview
For those of you who dont know what Geexbox is, there is an excellent explanation here. To sum it up in a sentence, it is a Media Center OS based on Linux with a very small memory footprint (I am running it off a 16Mb CF card with room to spare!). It is built and maintained by the guys over at GeexBox and I have high hopes for their excellent work. One thing I dont like is the default theme !

As such I have read the Wiki page on how to create themes (here) and made a handful of my own. I should point out that these themes are for the 1.x codebase. There has been some talk (and development) for a while now about changing the default theme interface. This involves moving away from mplayer and using a freevo system. Naturally these themes will not be compatible with the 2.x freevo system.

A quick tip : when making the background movie, please be aware that size and bitrate are important. If you are making a static background then you do not need to have a long stream which is highly compressed. This can cause artifacts as it loops. It is better to have a very short (1s or less) movie which does not use the motion / keyframe based updates of divX or xvid. You must also consider the hardware requirement. It is not good making a really good high quality background if it stutters. Remember some people run geexbox on very minimal hardware. Avoid high compression algorythms as these take more cpu muscle to decode. Also, remember some people run geexbox from a cf card. Some including myself do this with a 16mb CF. Whilst there are a few Mb left over after everything is installed, please remember possible size constraints. This may sound like the opposite of what I said about high compression algorythms, afterall using a less cpu intensive compression ratio will give larger file sizes. Check your resolution (geexbox is mostly not run in HD so even 640x480 is probably overkill) and frame rates.

Method 1) To install the theme, you need to incorporate it when building the iso through the generator (wiki here.)

Download and decompress the theme into the 'themes' folder of the generator. So if you are using the Windows generator, the target path would be something like this:

x:\.....\Geexbox-generator-1.0.i386\themes

And then just run the generator selecting the specific theme.

Method 2) I have been playing with an alternative method of changing a theme on an installed Geexbox. Assuming that you had Geexbox installed on a CF card, you could change the font and background avi manually on another computer. The two files are located :

\geexbox\usr\share\fonts\themefont.ttf

and

 \geexbox\usr\share\mplayer\background.avi

PLEASE NOTE - Themes are presently offline.

(Left:) A promo photo from the excellent Series Prison Break. (Right:) A beautiful photo taken from www.freephotos.com and spiced up with a hightech free font.



(Left:) A slightly demonic theme with scary font :P (Right:) A clean calm theme again, photo taken from www.freephotos.com.

Please note all work on this page is released absolutely freely. I reserve no rights with regards to these works - take them enjoy them and edit them all you like. All I ask is you credit me with a link back to my site and do not redistribute these works to other sites. You may link to this page but do not host these files elsewhere or link directly to them. Thanks