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Using ASP Pages to Dynamically Create Windows Media Metafile Playlists

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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 It has been superseded by MediaPlayer.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 use Active Server Pages (ASP, or .asp files) to dynamically generate playlists based on information provided by users. An ASP page is a dynamic webpage used in conjunction with Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS). ASP is an environment in which you can combine HTML, scripts, and reusable ActiveX server components to create dynamic and powerful Web-based business solutions. ASP pages enable server-side scripting for IIS with native support for both Microsoft Visual Basic Scripting Edition (VBScript) and Microsoft JScript. This discussion assumes that you are familiar with ASP and defining variables.

All header information must be contained on the first line of the ASP page string returned to Windows Media Player.

When you use ASP pages to generate playlists, you must specify values for the Response object's ContentType and expires properties in the ASP page because of latency issues with Windows Media Player. The Response.ContentType value must be a valid file name extension for Windows Media metafiles. Acceptable values include wma, wax, wmv, wvx, asf, and asx.

The Response.expires property specifies the length of time, in seconds, that Windows Media Player caches the playlist file. Specifying a value of zero results in Windows Media Player requesting a new playlist from the server each time the user refreshes the page.

See the Platform SDK for details about using the Response object in Active Server Pages.

The following code is an example of an ASP page used to generate a Windows Media metafile playlist.

<%Response.ContentType = "video/x-ms-wma"%><%Response.expires=0 %>
<ASX VERSION="3.0">
    <TITLE>Your title here</TITLE>
    <ENTRY>
        <REF HREF ="mms://adventure-works.com/pubpt/filename.wma" />
    </ENTRY>
</ASX>

Creating Metafile Playlists