TexturePacker

Kodi uses a tool named TexturePacker to compile all images used in a skin into a single file. The benefit of it is that images inside the Textures.xbt will load faster in the skin. This is done by converting all images into a format that take less processing by Kodi when they need to be rendered onto the screen.

A common misconception is that TexturPacker will just compress the images into a single file, this if far from the truth, so don't be surprised if the Textures.xbt file is much larger than to total size of all the individual images.

How To Get It
If you are using Windows, you can simply download a zipfile with an up-to-date version of TexturePacker from the Kodi mirrors.

It is available here: Download TexturePacker 1.0.2

On other platforms, you will have to compile TexturePacker yourself. This is done by compiling Kodi and when the compile is finished, you can find TexturePacker inside the ../tools/depends/native/TexturePacker directory.

Usage
Since TexturePacker is a command-line tool, you will need to open a dos box/terminal/console in order to run it. The general usage is: TexturePacker -input skin.name\media -output skin.name\media\Textures.xbt

Optionally, you can run TexturePacker with the -dupecheck option. This is useful if you have included the same image multiple times in your media folder. For example, if your skin includes a lot of studio logos, most likely a lot of them are included multiple times but with a slightly different filename. The '-dupecheck' option will make sure each unique image is included only once in the Textures.xbt file and thus keeping the size of it as small as possible.

If your skins includes Skin_development_introduction you should also run TexturePacker on your theme folders: TexturePacker -input skin.name\themes\Blue -output skin.name\media\Blue.xbt

Texturepacker build bat
Create a Texturepacker.bat with the contents below, inside the skin.name directory along with all the texturepacker.exe, a double click on the bat file does all the work for you. @ECHO OFF

COLOR A

ECHO - ECHO ^> ** Creating excludes... **

ECHO .svn>exclude.txt ECHO .git>>exclude.txt ECHO Thumbs.db>>exclude.txt ECHO Desktop.ini>>exclude.txt ECHO dsstdfx.bin>>exclude.txt ECHO build.bat>>exclude.txt ECHO \skin.confluence\media\>>exclude.txt ECHO \skin.confluence\backgrounds\>>exclude.txt ECHO exclude.txt>>exclude.txt

ECHO - ECHO.

ECHO - ECHO                  ** Creating Textures XBT File... ** ECHO -

ECHO. PING -n 2 -w 1000 127.0.0.1 > NUL START /B /WAIT TexturePacker -dupecheck -input media\ -output media\Texture.xbt PING -n 2 -w 20000 127.0.0.1 > NUL ECHO. ECHO. ECHO - ECHO ^> Deleting excludes... DEL exclude.txt ECHO ^> Done ECHO - ECHO. ECHO.

ECHO - ECHO       ** XBT build complete - scroll up to check for errors. ** ECHO -

PING -n 50 -w 5000 127.0.0.1 > NUL