Compiling a Catalog Update from Full Catalogs

[The feature associated with this page, Windows Media Player SDK, is a legacy feature. It has been superseded by MediaPlayer. MediaPlayer has been optimized for Windows 10 and Windows 11. Microsoft strongly recommends that new code use MediaPlayer instead of Windows Media Player SDK, when possible. Microsoft suggests that existing code that uses the legacy APIs be rewritten to use the new APIs if possible.]

A catalog update containing the changes between two versions of a compiled catalog can be created by using the syntax below, where path1 is the directory containing the first catalog, path2 is the directory containing the second catalog, and debug can be optionally included to display detailed error information on the screen. The catalog files must be in uncompressed form—the file name of the compiled catalog would be catalog.wmdb, rather than catalog.wmdb.lz.

catcomp diff <path1> <path2> [debug]

For example, if the C:\Catalog210\ directory contains version 210 of a full compiled catalog and C:\Catalog211\ contains version 211, the following command creates a difference file that contains the changes between the two versions:

catcomp diff C:\Catalog210\ C:\Catalog211\

To display detailed error information, you can add the optional debug parameter as follows:

catcomp diff C:\Catalog210\ C:\Catalog211\ debug

If compilation is successful, catcomp.exe creates the output files listed below and saves them in the directory that contains the first catalog.

File name	Description
catalog.diff	Uncompressed compiled difference file.
catalog.diff.lz	Compressed version of catalog update file. Your plug-in can give the location of this file to Windows Media Player in IWMPContentPartner::GetCatalogURL.
catalog.wmdb.delta	Intermediate output file. Not used by Windows Media Player
catalog.wmdb.modified	Intermediate output file. Not used by Windows Media Player