Yes it is indeed possible!

Like so many people, I had the need to customize the skin for the FLV player in Captivate. I initially thought that this was going to be very simple as I just needed to change the movieclips in the Skin fla file; just like we do for a playbar. However, the FLV skin source files are nowhere to be found on the Captivate installation folder. A quick search over the web and poking a few followers on Twitter confirmed that the fla files were not provided.

Hum … that’s unfortunate but not enough to stop me. So, I decided to experiment with creating my own skin … and succeeded! It’s not very complex but there are a few things to be careful about. The skin swf file basically contains one movieclip per button state (up, over, down, disabled) and one actionscript function that tells Captivate how the player will behave and where the buttons will be located. The key is the movieclip naming convention. The assets need to have some very specific names such as play_mc, pause_mc, stop_mc, etc.

Below is my test skin where I set the skin mode option to true so it hides the buttons when they are disabled. I could have also set the mode option to false and all the buttons would have been displayed all the time.

I will take a few more days to try to come up with some tutorial on how to create the FLV skin so stay tuned for an upcoming blog post!

New FLV Skin Sample Live Preview