Windows Media Player Control

The Microsoft® Windows Media® Player control is a Microsoft ActiveX® control used by developers to add multimedia playback capabilities to Web pages or applications. It allows you to embed Windows Media content in applications such as Internet Explorer. It also provides a programming interface for rendering a variety of network streaming and non-streaming multimedia formats.

The Windows Media Player control is built on Microsoft DirectShow® technology. DirectShow is based on Component Object Model (COM) architecture, which employs components called filters that can be plugged in to process multimedia data. Each filter is designed to receive digital input, process the data, and pass the results on to the next filter. The filters are arranged in a configuration called a filter graph. The Windows Media Player controls use an appropriate DirectShow filter graph to parse, decode, and render the media stream. The Windows Media Player controls are implemented through the DirectShow Filter Graph Manager (FGM).

The Windows Media Player control exposes a variety of methods, properties, and events for creating customized applications and Web pages. The following topics group the control's attributes into categories by functionality:

• Architecture
• Compatibility Modes
• Playback Methods and Properties
• Using Playlists
• Retrieving Presentation Information
• Processing Embedded Script Commands
• Monitoring Stream Status and Network Reception
• Capturing Keyboard and Mouse Events
• Error Handling
• Customizing the User Interface
• Content Formats (Codecs)

The following topics provide direct access to the reference documentation for the Windows Media Player control:

• Windows Media Player Methods
• Windows Media Player Properties
• Windows Media Player Events

This documentation also provides a list of the unsupported items in the Microsoft® Windows® CE .NET implementation of the Windows Media Player control. If a method or property is not supported under Windows CE, it is still exposed. However manipulating it will have no visible effect.

See Also

Windows Media Technologies | Getting Started with DirectShow

Last updated on Wednesday, April 13, 2005

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