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Retrieving Information About a Device

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[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 It has been superseded by MediaPlayer.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.]

Every device responds to the capability (MCI_GETDEVCAPS), status (MCI_STATUS), and info (MCI_INFO) commands. These commands obtain information about the device. For example, the following command returns "true" if a cdaudio device can eject the disc:

mciSendString(
    "capability cdaudio can eject", 
    lpszReturnString, lstrlen(lpszReturnString), NULL);

The flags listed for the required and basic commands provide a minimum amount of information about a device. Many devices supplement the required and basic commands with extended flags to provide additional information about the device.