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.
DOWNLOAD or READ THE COMPLETE PDF FILE & START CREATING YOUR SKINS FROM TODAY
just right click on the lick & click on save as to download the pdf