Changing The Skin (Appearance)
A great feature of Kodi is how much you can customize the look and feel, all the different looks you can go for are known as "skins". There are many to choose from and all are very simple to install but be aware some are more intensive on the system resources than others. What does this mean? If you've got a low spec device such as the raspberry pi then you'll want a lite skin that doesn't hog memory so my personal choice would be a skin like Amber which is very fast and fluid, skins like Aeon MQ5 is very customizable but very intensive on the system so this is not recommended for low spec devices.
As with all addons you can install via the brilliant Total Installer but for this example we'll go through how to install via the built-in Kodi system...
Step 1:
Go to System>Appearance>Skin, click right and select the "Skin" option.
Step 2:
You should now have an screen similar to the following one where you can select the skin of your choice. This only shows skins that have currently been downloaded to your system, if you want more you can either install via the Total Installer before doing this step or you can click on Get More... Please bear in mind if you click "Get More..." this will only show skins from the repositories you have installed and not EVERY skin like you'll get with Total Installer.
Step 3:
Now your new skin has been enabled your appearance should have changed, I've switched to Amber in the following example but whatever skin you chose there should be a "Settings" option just below "Skin". In this settings option you can edit lots of skin settings and make it completely bespoke for your needs, different skins have different settings available so we'll go into this in future tutorials.
You'll notice in the above screenshot the "settings" option is greyed out, this is because Amber is fairly unique in the fact that when you click on Settings from the homepage it will actually load up all your skin settings. This makes the "settings" option in Appearance redundant so that's why it's greyed out, Amber really is an exception to the rule as virtually every other skin will have this option available!
A great feature of Kodi is how much you can customize the look and feel, all the different looks you can go for are known as "skins". There are many to choose from and all are very simple to install but be aware some are more intensive on the system resources than others. What does this mean? If you've got a low spec device such as the raspberry pi then you'll want a lite skin that doesn't hog memory so my personal choice would be a skin like Amber which is very fast and fluid, skins like Aeon MQ5 is very customizable but very intensive on the system so this is not recommended for low spec devices.
As with all addons you can install via the brilliant Total Installer but for this example we'll go through how to install via the built-in Kodi system...
Step 1:
Go to System>Appearance>Skin, click right and select the "Skin" option.
Step 2:
You should now have an screen similar to the following one where you can select the skin of your choice. This only shows skins that have currently been downloaded to your system, if you want more you can either install via the Total Installer before doing this step or you can click on Get More... Please bear in mind if you click "Get More..." this will only show skins from the repositories you have installed and not EVERY skin like you'll get with Total Installer.
Step 3:
Now your new skin has been enabled your appearance should have changed, I've switched to Amber in the following example but whatever skin you chose there should be a "Settings" option just below "Skin". In this settings option you can edit lots of skin settings and make it completely bespoke for your needs, different skins have different settings available so we'll go into this in future tutorials.
You'll notice in the above screenshot the "settings" option is greyed out, this is because Amber is fairly unique in the fact that when you click on Settings from the homepage it will actually load up all your skin settings. This makes the "settings" option in Appearance redundant so that's why it's greyed out, Amber really is an exception to the rule as virtually every other skin will have this option available!