Big Pimpin: Custom Icons and Thumbnails

One of hottest features of Xbox media center is its look. Chokemaniac has done an incredible job making it very usable and attractive. While a lot has been done to make the interface look great, its up to you to get stylee with your own content.

Luckily there are a few things you can do to get your own custom thumbnails for your videos, music, photos, games, and applications. Read more to learn how you can improve the look of your Xbmc just with a few pixels.

Formats & Sizes

There really isn't any restrictions on image formats used for icons. Gif, Jpg, and Png all work perfect. Png files support alpha channels, so they are usually the best bet for icons in Xbmc. Alpha channels allow for transparency and we know how good transparency can look with an interface this good. Square blocks, yech.

No matter what size your icons are, they will be resized appropriately. But if you know anything about images, you'll want to keep your icons to around 32px by 32px to avoid image degradation due to a large amount of resizing.

Games & Applications

Now that you have some icons you'll want to apply them to your content. Applying custom icons for games and applications is pretty simple. Choose the graphic that you want and then move it to the folder of the application you want it to represent. Rename the image to default.tbn. Tbn is for "thumbnail". Remember, it doesn't matter what the image format is, just change the extension to .tbn

Folder Icons

Creating thumbnail for a folder is just as easy. Put the graphic within the folder you'd like it to display for and name it folder.jpg. A cinch! This works great for album folders and genre folders for movies.

Music Files

To grab album art for your music, select the song you'd like to grab info for and bring up the contextual menu. Select Album Information and Xbmc will get the cover art as well as album info. It will also automatically apply the album art to the rest of the songs in the album.

Video Files

Most of us are using Xbmc as a means to view our mass library of movies stored on a server. Of course for browsing, it'd be nice to have the corresponding movie poster that goes along with all of our movies. Thanks to the awesome functionality provided by Xbmc, we can get that with a touch of a button. Place your cursor on a movie and bring up the contextual menu. Choose Search IMDB... and Xbmc will query IMDB.com to grab the movie poster as well as the movie information.

Let's say IMDB grabs the movie info and no movie poster, or the movie poster it DID get isn't what you want. Its easy to replace the image. First go to Imdb.com and get the IMDB number from the URL of the movie. IE, The Day After Tomorrow's URL is: http://imdb.com/title/tt0312600/, so remember 'tt0312600' and use it to rename your thumbnail, imdbtt0073486.jpg. Then place it in the thumbs/imdb directory at the root of your Xbmc directory and it will be applied to the movie file.

For files that can't get any IMDB info, name the icon file the same as the file you would like it to represent with a .tbn extension ie: Transformers.avi, Transformers.tbn.


Ok, while I didn't mean for that to be that long, I wanted to make sure it was complete and easy to follow. Stick around for more how-to's in the Big Pimpin' series.