Texture Attributes

Image Size and Type Restrictions
For the tags, and for all tags in other controls, there is a small set of rules that you should follow if at all possible:

Size
Images should be as close as possible to the nearest highest power of 2 in width and height. The reason for this is XBMC uses swizzled textures which are quicker to render and quicker to load once they're compressed into the Textures.xpr file. Note that the image does not need to be square, and will not be scaled into a power of 2 size. Rather, any pixels outside of a power of two size will simply be dead space (wasted memory). If you cannot manage this, then XBMCTex will opt for a linear (non-swizzled) texture format which must be aligned to 64 pixels in the horizontal, but has no restrictions in the vertical direction. These are slightly slower to load and render, but for the most part there's not a lot of difference. The XBMCTex program that does the image injection into Textures.xpr will tell you what format it's using, and how much pixel wastage (memory waste) is contained in each image.

Formats
If you wish to use full 8 bit transparency, then use PNG. If you only need a single transparent colour, then you can specify this in the tag, so any image will be fine. It is suggested that you use PNG and JPG as much as possible. Note that once the images are injected into Textures.xpr, they are not stored as JPG or PNG – rather they are stored in a xbox native format for faster loading. The size of the images (in kb) is therefore not as important as the size of the images in pixels – so feel free to store them in a lossless (eg PNG) manner if you wish.

The only exception to this is if you require an animated texture. In this case, we only support animated GIF. There are also SOME animated gifs that may not work. Use ImageReady CS and make sure you set the gif-anim to “restore to background” and they should work fine.

Attributes of the texture tags
The following attributes can be used to alter how a texture is rendered. These apply to all texture tags (for example and so on). Note that they're all lower-case, as XML is case-sensitive.