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Windows Media Player Skins

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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 It has been superseded by MediaPlayer.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.]

Windows Media Player provides a programming platform to create custom skins. Skins are sets of scripts, art, media, and text files that can be combined to create a new appearance for Windows Media Player. Using skins, you can change not only the way Windows Media Player looks, but how it functions. Not just where the knobs are and what they look like, but what they do, given the limits of the underlying Windows Media Player core technology.

Skin technology is very different from other kinds of programming; essentially you will be mixing programming and art in equal parts. You do not need to be an expert programmer (not much more than you already know if you have created webpages and done some simple scripting), nor do you need to be an artist (as long as you can use a graphics editing application). You'll be using XML (similar to HTML), Microsoft JScript, and whatever art programs you choose.

The skins documentation contains the following four sections.

Section Description
About Skins Discusses the theory of skins in abstract terms. You are advised to at least browse this section because skin technology is so different from other kinds of programming. This section tells you why and how things work, but only skims over the details.
Skin Creation Guide Explains what you need to do to create a skin. You will probably want to read this section because it covers the details of creating simple skins, and then more complicated skins that use particular skin elements. This section also includes tutorials on creating the art needed to create skins.
Skin Programming Reference Contains reference entries for every element and attribute supported by skins. Read the topics that explain the functionality that you want to use.
Windows Media Player Mobile Skins Provides complete information for creating skins for Windows Media Player Mobile.

 

Windows Media Player SDK