Display Area Plug-ins (deprecated)
[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 It has been superseded by MediaPlayer.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.]
This page documents a feature that may be unavailable in future versions of Windows Media Player and the Windows Media Player SDK.
Display area UI plug-ins are shown in the main area of the Now Playing pane, below the artist and track information and to the left of the playlist area. Only one display area plug-in can be enabled at a time. When a display area plug-in is enabled, the Player cannot enter full screen mode.
Display area plug-ins are useful for displaying large amounts of information. For example, a display area plug-in can retrieve information about the currently playing media item and display related articles, interviews, and reviews. A display area plug-in can host a Microsoft Internet Explorer browser window to display this information using HTML.
Note
A hosted browser window can embed the ActiveX version of Windows Media Player, but this is not recommended because the embedded control cannot communicate with the standalone player that contains it.
Note
Windows Media Player closes any open display area plug-in when the user plays content that contains video.
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