Creating Your Own Windows 7 Media Center Theme

Part 1: Getting the Software

The proper software is important when you being to design your own Media Center theme. Certain software can make the process go that much smoother, both for you and your audience. For instance some software allows you to work easily with PNG (Portable Network Graphics) the native image format used in Windows 7 Media Center themes. On the other hand, some software is free and some is not. Therefore you will need to choose between simplicity and convenience and price.

Resource Editors

The first item you are going to need is a good resource editor. A resource editor is a piece of software that allows you to deconstruct a DLL (Dynamic Link Library) file and then reconstruct it, after making changes of course. For this purpose there are quite a few free resources available. Unfortunately, there are no good solutions that will natively allow you to work with the PNG format.

Free Resource Editors

The two most popular resource editors available for free are ResEdit and Resource Hacker. Although they are both free for use the difficulty involved is far above that of the paid software recommended below and isn’t suggested for beginners. For that reason these guides will deal mostly with another program, which can be had on a trail basis free of charge, called Restorator.

Paid Resource Editors

Restorator is a high quality program that allows you the ability to natively view and manage PNG files as well as providing an easy drag and drop interface to work with. Also included in the retail version of the software is the ability to create patches, pieces of software that are able to reconstruct your edits and place them into an already exsisting DLL file. This has two advantages, first it greatly decreases the size of the file that needs to be downloaded and distributed and it also increases the potential compatibility of your themes.

DLL files can vary greatly between versions of Media Center but simply replacing the images used for the theme is fairly fail safe, whereas replacing the entire DLL file will often cause crashes between different versions. Though there will likely be some slight differences in appearance between themes on different versions of Media Center there will be less likelyhood of a fatal error occuring if a patch is used. Therefore this is the suggested method of distribution for Media Center themes. However, the ability does come at a price of about $80 US.

Image Editors

You will also need an image editing program. There are several excellent programs available free of charge. These include Paint.net, GIMP and many, many others. Though a neccesity to the process we aren’t going to cover much of the use of these in this set of guides. This is due to the fact that tutorials for these (and most other worthwhile image editors) are widely available online. A simple Google search for tutorials will bring you amply results on style and technique.

On the paid side there is also the ubiquitous Photoshop of course, but at the price they’re asking we certainly don’t expect you to pony up for this piece of software on a lark. If you should happen to already own a copy however you will find yourself well equipt for editing PNG images for your new themes.