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Skin Creation Guide

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[The feature associated with this page, Windows Media Player SDK, is a legacy feature. It has been superseded by MediaPlayer. MediaPlayer has been optimized for Windows 10 and Windows 11. Microsoft strongly recommends that new code use MediaPlayer instead of Windows Media Player SDK, when possible. Microsoft suggests that existing code that uses the legacy APIs be rewritten to use the new APIs if possible.]

This guide is a series of detailed explanations of how to create different kinds of skins. For more general information on skins, see About Skins. For specific details about every attribute, method, and event used in skins, see the Skin Programming Reference. As you get more involved in the programming of your skin, you may want to read the part of this SDK covering the Windows Media Player Object Model.

In this guide, instructions for creating the art will be given for Adobe Photoshop 5.5, a popular art manipulation program. The specific instructions may be different if you have a similar art program such as Jasc Paint Shop Pro or Sonic Foundry Viscosity, but the concepts will be the same. Photoshop was chosen for two reasons: it is a popular art program for commercial artists, and it works with layers. As you will see in the tutorials, layers are very useful for skin creation.

This guide will cover the following tasks.

Task Description
Building Your First Skin A walk-through of a simple skin that starts and stops Windows Media Player.
Adding a Playlist How to use a simple playlist.
Choosing Files How to pick files with an open file dialog box.
Adding Video How to put a video window into your skin.
Adding Visualizations How to add visualizations.
Adding a Slider How to use a slider to track the progress of your media content ... and let the user change it!
Creating Custom Sliders How to control the volume with a custom slider.
Other Skin Samples See the samples section of the SDK.

 

Windows Media Player Skins