Device Names

[The feature associated with this page, MCI, 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 It has been superseded by MediaPlayer.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 MCI, when possible. Microsoft suggests that existing code that uses the legacy APIs be rewritten to use the new APIs if possible.]

For each device type, there might be several MCI drivers that share the command set but operate on different data formats. To uniquely identify an MCI driver, MCI uses device names.

Device names are identified either in the [mci] section of the SYSTEM.INI file or in the appropriate part of the registry. This information identifies all MCI drivers to Windows. The entries in the [mci] section use the following form:

device_name = driver_filename.extension

The following example shows a typical [mci] section from SYSTEM.INI:

[mci]
cdaudio=mcicda.drv 
sequencer=mciseq.drv 
waveaudio=mciwave.drv 
avivideo=mciavi.drv

If an MCI driver is installed using a device name that already exists in SYSTEM.INI or the registry, the system appends an integer to the device name of the new driver, creating a unique device name. In the preceding example, an additional driver installed using the "cdaudio" device name would be assigned the device name "cdaudio1".