You must have seen a lot of Skins for Windows Media Player and must be using some of them, but have you ever thought of creatin one by yourself, if any such thought came in your mind than you are at right place, in this tutorial I am going to explain you how to create a skin for Windows Media Player. You don’t have to be a GURU of Photoshop or a DIE HARD CODER to create your own skin file, you can learn and make any skin file by scratch.

Lets have a look at what we are going to create in this tutorial, this would give you some enthusiasm to work till its not finished.

Before actually starting working on my tutorial please read the following theory carefully, you can also leave that and can start directly working but it is recommended that you first read it, it will give you a general overview and will really help you a lot.

How to create skin for Window Media Player

What a skin is?
When art work (pictures), some scripts, text files and media are combined together to give Window Media Player a new look and feel, this is what I called a skin. Skin defines the basic functionality of Media Player i.e. where to place buttons, how it should perform, how it should look etc. In this tutorial I will tell you how to create a skin. Windows Media Player already have a lot of skins, but creating your own skin is something different. Creating a skin is really something different you don’t need to be a good programmer nor it needs a good work at computer graphics i.e. art work. If you have ever worked on paint or Photoshop than that is enough. If you have ever worked on HTML or some scripting language than it is well and good otherwise it is not required at all.

Source code
What makes creating a skin easy is the source code which you can see of any skin mind it you can see the art work, script file of any skin. Basically skin file are loaded by default in C:\Program Files\Windows Media Player\Skins folder. These skin files are in the compressed in a package having the extension wmz. So to decompress the file and view the contents rename the .WMZ file to .ZIP and use an unzipping utility such as WinZIP or WinRAR to extract the containing files.

Skin Files
As said above skin is a group of files and all files has its own function. There are mainly 3 types of file they are- File type

Description

Skin Definition File
This is a text file and has a .wms file name extension. This is the main file which contains the position of components, and how other art file and scripts are to be used.

Art Files
It contains the graphic part of your skin i.e. how your skin would look. These include BMP, GIF, JPEG, and PNG files.

JScript Files
This is a text file and has a .js file name extension. It contains the information/command of event which has to be take place.

Skin Definition File: Skin definition files contain the basic instructions for what the skin does and where other files used by the skin can be found. There can only be one skin definition file for a skin, and it has a .wms file name extension. The instructions in the skin definition file are written in eXtensible Markup Language (XML), which is similar to HTML. If you have used HTML to create Web pages, you will find that XML looks familiar.

Now since we have learned the basic its time to forward and learn hoe to create the skin.

Go on and Download the PDF file below which have the complete step by steap tutorial from level ZERO and the reference skin file used.

DOWNLOAD (PDF & Skin File Attached)

If you need any sort of assistance do let me know

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