Customised Control Bar - Embedded WMP

Hi Guys - was hoping I could pick your brains over this one.

Essentially the company I am working for has decided to rebuild their site from scratch - and part of the new design includes embedded video - now we are going to go down the path of FLV eventually - after we convert our existing content over etc etc..

However someone up the chain thought it would be a really great idea to use the same player design for WMP as for the FLV (which is still going to be a couple months off). Unfortantely since we have less than 1 1/2 week to launch (when they decided to spring this on me) - I have very little time to try and nut this out myself.

What I would like to know is how I can start applying replacement images to the background bar, volume bars etc etc - what format they need to be in etc etc.

Any help you can provide will be so appricated (opens 6 can of red bull for the day heheh)

Cheers
Gil-Dale

You can make your own flv player. The tutorials found on www.gotoandlearn.com are good for this. You can use whatever images you like. He uses text but you can use images if you like.

Hi Aerospace - sorry - the FLV player part is actually fine - I have actually got to create customised controls for a WMP player since I have to stick with streaming WMVs till November at least.

Oh I see. You aren't going to have much luck with that because in order to control the buttons you'll need javascript and for the javascript to work in any browser but IE you will need to have activex installed so that means the javascript won't work in Opera, or Firefox or a lot of other browsers because these browsers don't have activex installed.

Ahh that make sense - now comes the fun part of trying to explain that to management.

I am guessing if i apply the "skin" then there will be no controls (or functioning controls in FF)

Well at least the embedding with the standard interface works with FF and IE - just got to change some of the param settings then.

Thanks Aero

Maybe you can find a way to display the custom GUI to IE only?

Not worth the hassel for a couple of months - I will just work out the params I need to show and hid and I will be fine.

the current issue of ALA actually discuses you conundrum.
NOT in the sense that it solves your technical problem, but in the sense that it speaks of how it is important that you explain to your boss that what they want is ridiculous.

http://alistapart.com/issues/237