Mplayer Media Player Tutorial #2 Audio & Video Cross-Platform Excellent DVD Video Management Customizable Interface

MPlayer Tutorial #2 – How to Change MPlayer Skin

MPlayer is a solid free media player that besides being multi-platform is really handy when it comes to playing video files, regardless its format, MPlayer can handle almost any video file type thanks to its extensive input/output support for multiple video formats and native codecs including XAnim, and Win32 DLL's. This awesome free media player also plays CDs, SVCDs, DVDs, Divx and DivX 3/4/5, being able to handle 14 different subtitle formats What is really interesting about MPlayer is its modular interface that can be customized by the use of skins, and this is specifically what I'm going to tell you about in this second tutorial.

What you need to follow this tutorial is to have MPlayer installed and ready to run in your computer. To make things easier there is a “Download” button you can click on top of this page to get your free fully functional copy of of MPlayer, the InstallIQTM installer that will help you with the setup.

The first thing you have to do to apply a new skin is to get it from the MPlayer official website here: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html#skins there is an extensive list of them and if you click on the name you get a preview. For this tutorial I downloaded a couple just as an example but you can download as many as you want. It is important that you download them to the skins folder you can find in the Setup directory : C:\Program Files\MPlayer\mplayer\skins.

Once you have downloaded it you have to decompress the file using an archiver like 7-Zip, so, decompress the archive until you get a folder with th5e name of the skin you want to use that should be twice. Right click on the .tar.bz2 file and select 7-Zip → Extract Here and you'll get a .tar file

Again right-click on the .tar file and go to 7-Zip → Extract Here and you'll get a folder named after the skin.

Now open MPlayer and right-click the interface and from the popup menu select Skin Browser.

You'll get a small window with the list of skins you've already downloaded and decompressed. As you can see in mine, I got Ater and Icy, the Blue skin is the default skin that comes with MPlayer installation package.

So, all you have to do is to click on any of the names from the list and voilà, your skin will be changed.

Final Words

As you can see MPlayer offers multiple and attractive options when it comes to skins customization. You can also make your own skins if you want too, but that matter exceeds the scope of this tutorial.
Download MPlayer by clicking on the “Download Now” link below, its free and no registration is required.