Playing with Skins

It’s fun to change the look of Windows Media Player with the new batch of Skins released today or grab one from the Skins Factory, but why settle for someone else’s idea of cool when it’s so easy to make your own? Skins are just collections of art files, organized by a text file that tells WMP how to use the files to display a skin. One reason skins are easy to create is that you can look at the individual pieces of art and the source code for any skin and see how the skin is put together.

Custom skins are not just about looking cool. You can add new functionality like in this NVIDIA skin. Maybe you want to switch from classical to hard-core rock when your bug count goes up, for example. Or you can use a URL to load a media file that will be played by WMP and request that a particular skin be used with that file. (The skin has to be installed on the user's machine though; or the previous skin will be used.)

Check out the MSDN pages about Windows Media Player Skins and their creation. Once you’ve tried it you might want to move on to skinning with Visual Studio 2005.

Comments

• Anonymous
  November 02, 2007
  It’s fun to change the look of Windows Media Player with the new batch of Skins released today or grab