Energy Blue Media Player Skin

[Whulph]

I realize it might be a little bit late to be posting this, but for anyone who might still find this useful, I present yet another minor barrier-breaker between Tablet PC and the rest of the XP world.

Wow, nice eye candy.

Unfortunately, if you've ever tried to install a Tablet PC powertoy or experience pack on a "regular" Windows XP system, in hopes of getting a cool skin, theme, or utility, you know all too well what happens next: Microsoft glares at you with a nice "Tablet PC only!!" error. Bummer.

"No Energy Blue Media Player skin for you!!"

Not so. It's actually very easy to work around the error and get the Media Player skin you desire. All it requires is three minutes out of your day. If three minutes is too long, a quick Google or Two should land you the Media Player skin, already extracted and ready to go. But for those who feel like taking the slightly geeky route, here's how to go about extracting the Media Player skin manually. (Links within [brackets] indicate screenshots.)

Requirements:

1: Windows Media Player version 10. (Version 11 seems to experience problems with the skin.)

2: Microsoft's Experience Pack for Tablet PC

3: If you don't already have it, get Resource Hacker as well.

Extracting the Cabinet:

Fire up Resource Hacker, open up InstallExperiencePack.exe.

[Expand the RCData tree on the left.] Expand the second tree under RCData, the Cabinet tree. Don't click on the Cabinet 1033 resource, as Resource Hacker seems to freeze while trying to display the hex contents of this particular resource. Instead, [right click the RCData tree,] and select "Save [ RCData ] resources". Specify a folder and a file name (doesn't matter what you name it) for the RCData contents to be extracted to. The resource we're after, the Cabinet resource, will be extracted as RCData_2.bin, as it is the second resource listed in the RCData tree.

Navigate to the directory where you saved the RCData tree, and [rename RCData_2.bin to RCData_2.cab.] Delete the other files, as they won't be needed.

Extract the contents of the CAB file with your preferred archival program (WinZip, WinRAR, etc. Even regular ol' [Windows Explorer should do fine] when it comes to CAB files).

Extracting the Experience Pack contents:

Open a Command Prompt window. (Start => Run => cmd). Enter [the following command] into the window * :

msiexec /a "C:\Path to MSI File\Launcher.msi" TARGETDIR="C:\Output Directory"

Change the path to the MSI file and the desired output directory as needed.

Click "next" through the installation wizard until you reach the [fourth and final screen,] which says "Click next to select the programs to install." Instead of clicking next, close the window using the X. Clicking next will just take you to an unnecessary installation screen, that doesn't work very well on a non-Tablet PC anyway.

Navigate to TARGETDIR, or wherever you installed the experience pack files, and you'll find the extracted contents of the MSI file.

Navigate to the Microsoft\Experience Pack\Data subdirectory.

[Rename EnergyB.dat to EnergyB.msi.]

Extracting the Energy Blue theme contents:

If you closed the Command Prompt window, (you loose, Simon didn't say!) re-open it, and install the contents of the MSI file with [the following command] * :

msiexec /a "C:\Path to MSI file\EnergyB.msi" TARGETDIR="C:\Desired Installation Directory"

Click next through the installation wizard until the window closes, then navigate to TARGETDIR. There you will find [the Energy Blue MSI file contents.] Both the [Media Player skin], as well as the [Energy Blue XP theme], are there. Do what you like with the Energy Blue XP theme ** , as for the Media Player skin, just double click it to install.

* - Alternatively, if you're not much for getting your hands dirty in a command-line interface, you can try one of two MSI extraction utilities, both of which are free and very easy to use: Universal Extractor - by nitro322 of MSFN, and Less MSIérables.

** - If you want to install the Tablet PC Energy Blue theme in XP as well, just copy and paste the entire Resources folder to your C:\WINDOWS directory to install it. To use it, just right-click the Desktop, click Properties, and on the Appearance tab, under Windows and buttons, [select "Tablet PC Style"] from the list.

I meant to post this months ago. Completely forgot about it, until today when I was reorganizing my files, and chanced upon this post in a text file. Not sure if this will be of interest to anyone anymore, as I'm guessing the topic is somewhat dated...but it's here all the same, in hopes that someone finds it useful.

Edited December 7, 2006 by Whulph

[neo]

Nice theme.........Thanks

[mau-yong]

After following all the steps, I find that media player skin is all I want and worth keeping. Thanks!

[XL-DJK]

Please update your ResHacker link to mine:

ResHacker MSI Installer

Compliments of Allanol for supplying link ! ! !

Edited December 31, 2006 by XL-DJK95355

[KRYOGENIUS]

Hello

Nice theme thanks !

Good idea the resource hacker msi !

++