Revision as of 02:32, 23 November 2010

Some of the most visually appealing forms of thumbnails are Wide Banner Icons.

See main article: Thumbnails

1 About Wide Banner Icons

Support for Wide Banner Icons were added in XBMC in January of 2007 and are now an integral part of the XBMC Media Center look and feel. With different adjustments to the skin xml files, you may disable title names, or stack one icon on top of another. To show big Icons, switch to one of the new views, Big Wide or Wide Icons. Remember View: XBMC Will now remember what view you have for each folder. (Thus you can keep your TV Shows in Wide, and your Movies in Icon)

2 Sources for Wide Banner Icons

• thetvdb.com website is the ultimate site in finding and sharing Wide Banner Icons for TV Shows. It includes hundreds of Wide Icons for almost every TV Show produced, and you can upload banners that you made yourself.
• themoviedb.org website is the ultimate site in finding and sharing Wide Icons for Movies. It includes hundreds of Wide Icons for almost every Movie produced, and you can upload banners that you made yourself.
• http://mediaicons.org website run by Empor3r. This site was very user-friendly and included almost all the XBMC icons out there. It was also unique in that it included a feature on the site for applying special effects to Wide Icons (Glass, Scanlines, etc). The website was updated daily by Empor3r who has helped tremendously in trying to organize where we download wide banner icons, but is apparently no longer valid.
• xbox-scene.com forum thread for wide banner icons this is the original thread and includes packs of Wide Banner Icons collected from websites around the world
• http://www.xbox.com Click search, find your game, download the banner on the frontpage.
• http://xbmc.ckdvt.com website run by NineT9Mustang & imamafackinhokie. This was the original website that hosted all the Wide Icons (The older Wide Icons), it also hosts tilted Wide Icons, Emulator Icons, Application Icons, Homebrew Icons, and a many more... This site has been abandoned and is no longer available.

2.1 Icon Packs

• Xbox Games (50MB) - This includes all the wide icons for Xbox Games (Approx. 899).
• Other (12MB) - This includes all the wide icons for Emulators, Apps, Homebrew, Folders (approx. 87 icons).

Tip! If you do not find the Wide Banner Icon your looking for above, post a request as a reply in the xbox-scene.com forum thread for wide banner icons.

3 How to make you own wide banner icons

If you would like to make them on your own then work with a 758 x 140 template.

• Banners must use 758 x 140 pixel size resolution.
• Banners must be JPG (not BMP, GIF, nor PNG).
• Template can be downloaded from TheTVDB.com (contains centering lines for proper text placement).

3.1 Graphical Series Banners

• Graphical Banners are defined as having a graphical/logo version of the series name.

3.2 Text Series Banners

• Text Banners generally use Arial Bold font, 27pt as the text.

3.3 Blank Series Banners

• The main requirement for blank banners is they should be blank on the left side of the banner as that is where the auto-generated text will be placed. Similar to this:

3.4 Season Series Banners

• Try to make the season designation obvious enough to read without being gaudy. As with the series banners, images can be either text or graphical.