Change the appearance of Windows Media Player 12

Launch Windows Media Player (WMP) in the usual way – it will be on the Start menu or pinned to the Taskbar at the bottom of the screen. By default, WMP takes up a lot of screen space and isn’t very inspiring, so let’s see what we can do about that. Hold down the Ctrl (Control) key on the keyboard and tap M to reveal the hidden menu. Open the View menu and click Skin chooser.

This is where WMP 12 stores its skins. They’re listed on the left and when one is clicked it will be previewed in the main window so you can see what it looks like. We’ve chosen Corporate: this is much smaller than the ‘standard’ WMP front end and may be useful to people who have small displays or are short of screen space. To use it click the Apply Skin button at the top of the list.

Although useful, this skin is pretty basic – so let’s download something fancier. Open the View menu and again click Skin chooser. This time when the Skin chooser window opens click the More Skins button on the button bar. This launches Microsoft’s Skins for Windows Media Player website in the default browser. Pick a skin you like the look of and click the Download link. When the File Download dialogue box appears, click Open and then after that, click Yes to install the skin. When it’s finished, click the Close button.

Flip back to the WMP application window and once more pick Skin chooser from the View menu. The downloaded skin should be listed on the left – click to select it. We’ve chosen a Batman Begins skin, which is quite different from the standard skins supplied with WMP. Indeed, as we’ll see in just a moment, it’s both flashier and a lot more entertaining to use. To make the change to the new look and feel, click the Apply Skin button.

And here’s the Batman Begins player in action on the Windows Desktop – it springs to life with a nice rolling animation (you’ll just have to take our word for that part). Many of the commands, such as Play, Pause and Stop, are pretty self-evident but some of the others are a bit more opaque. Try hovering the mouse pointer over any of the buttons and Windows will display a little tooltip explaining what it does. Perhaps the most important one is Return To Full Mode, which returns WMP to the default view (see Step 1).

Batman Begins demonstrates what a good skin can offer. Here we’ve opened various options that are included with the player by clicking the icons at the bottom of the central oval window to open the Visualization window (the blue swirly thing at the bottom) the playlist above it and the graphic equalizer to the left of that. All these windows are resizable so they can take up as little or as much space as you like.