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Detecting Windows Media Player from an Application

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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 It has been superseded by MediaPlayer.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.]

You can determine what version of Windows Media Player is installed by checking the following registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Active Setup\Installed Components

For Windows Media Player 6.4, look at key {22d6f312-b0f6-11d0-94ab-0080c74c7e95}.

For Windows Media Player 7 or later, look at key {6BF52A52-394A-11d3-B153-00C04F79FAA6}.

Under either of these keys, if the IsInstalled

Data type

DWORD
DWORD value is set to 0x1, you can safely use the **Version**

Data type

string
string value as the version of Windows Media Player that is installed.

Redistributing Windows Media Player Software