Navarre - a minimalist, remote-first Kodi 21 skin for movies and TV (set up in minutes, poster wall on everything)
For the HTPC crowd: I got tired of how much fuss it takes to get a clean, couch-friendly media UI out of Kodi, so I built a stripped-down skin called Navarre. Point it at your media folder and it builds the menu for you; it browses your folders exactly as they sit on disk (no library scan), drops a full-res poster wall on everything, and it's all laid out for a D-pad remote, not a mouse. Minutes from install to browsing your movies on the TV. I run it on a Shield, and it works on a Windows HTPC too. Kodi 21 (Omega).
The one party trick I didn't expect to enjoy building: comics. Kodi can't open comic PDFs at all, and it montages .cbz/.cbr inner pages into a thumbnail instead of showing the cover. Navarre shows the real cover for every comic - cbz, cbr, and pdf - and it'll even pull clean covers out of the copy-protected PDFs a lot of old comic sets ship as. Niche, sure, but it's the kind of detail the whole skin is built on.
What you get:
- Files-mode browsing - your folder structure stays exactly as it is, no library flattening
- Poster wall everywhere by default, with a two-pane sidebar across Movies, TV, Music, Photos, and Comics
- One-press "Set up my media" - point at a root folder and the whole menu builds itself
- Continue watching / Resume - picks up films and shows where you left off (Back during a film stops it and saves your place)
- Self-managing menu - add, rename, move, re-icon, or delete items right from the home screen
- A genuinely simple settings page, with full Kodi settings still one tap away
Repo, install steps, and screenshots: https://github.com/NavarreDR/navarre-repo
Navarre is a personal fork of Arctic: Zephyr - Reloaded (full credit kept, CC BY-NC-SA). Not pitched as the AZ-R successor - martian's fork is the actively maintained one. This is just the pared-down version I built for my own setup. Free and non-commercial. Feedback from people who live in their HTPC welcome.