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Managing Media Items

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[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 It has been superseded by MediaPlayer.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 Media object represents one media item. It has properties and methods you can use to retrieve information and display it to the user, or to take different actions based on the value you retrieve.

Much of your work with Media objects involves metadata about the content of the media item, called the attributes. The topic Media Item Attributes describes how to read and change attribute values. In addition to this topic, see the Windows Media Metadata Usage Guidelines on the Microsoft website for more information about the attributes and their use.

The Media object has properties and methods that retrieve some attributes directly, such as the name or duration of the item. For video items, you can retrieve the height and width of the image, and you can retrieve marker information based on the name or index of a marker. You can also determine whether a particular media item is included in a particular playlist.

Retrieving a Media Object

You can quickly access the current media item by using the Player.currentMedia property.

Throughout this topic, the Player object was defined in the following manner:

AxWMPLib.AxWindowsMediaPlayer Player;
using WMPLib;

The following C# example retrieves a Media object representing the current item.

IWMPMedia media;
media = Player.currentMedia;

You can create a new media item from a digital media file by using the Player.newMedia method. You pass the method the URL path to a digital media file, and it returns a reference to the new Media object. The method does not add the new object to the library directly. However, you can pass the object to the Playlist.appendItem method or the Playlist.insertItem method.

The following C# example creates a Media object based on one of the digital media samples installed with the Windows Media Player SDK.

IWMPMedia media;
media = Player.newMedia("C:\\WMSDK\\WMPSDK10\\samples\\media\\laure.wma");

Note

You must include two backslash (\) characters (or use the @ character in C#) in a string to represent one actual backslash character. This is because C# uses a single backslash character to define an escape sequence.

 

You can create a new media item from a digital media file and add it to the library in one step by using the MediaCollection.add method. Like the Player.newMedia method, the add method takes a path to a digital media file.

The following C# example creates a Media object based on one of the SDK sample files and adds that object to the library.

IWMPMedia media;
media = Player.mediaCollection.add("C:\\WMSDK\\WMPSDK10\\samples\\media\\laure.wma");

You can retrieve a Media object representing a media item in a playlist by using the Playlist.item method. The following C# example retrieves the sixth media item from the current playlist.

IWMPMedia media;
media = Player.currentPlaylist.get_Item(5);

Controls.currentItem

Managing Playlists

Media Object

MediaCollection.add

Player.currentMedia

Player.newMedia

Playlist.item

Working with the Library