License Pre-Delivery

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 It has been superseded by Source Reader and Sink Writer.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

License pre-delivery is the process used to pull licenses to a client computer preemptively. A common scenario for using pre-delivery is when a user subscribes to a music service. Without delivering licenses before they are needed, the user would have to wait for license acquisition for each new song.

Because pre-delivery is not done as a response to attempted access, it is typically performed only by the content owner. That is, you can only pre-deliver licenses for content that you control. The pre-delivery process is a coordination between a client component and a license server built by using the objects of the Windows Media Digital Rights Management SDK.

License pre-delivery is similar to Non-Silent License Acquisition. Follow the same steps, except that you don't have a DRM header to pass to IWMDRMLicenseManagement::AcquireLicense. The method will generate a challenge that is not content-specific that you can send to your license server.

Alternatively you can use the Windows Media Rights Manager to pre-deliver licenses.

Related topics

Acquiring Licenses

Using the Media Foundation Event Model