Nesting Metafiles
[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 It has been superseded by MediaPlayer.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 metafile can reference another metafile. To reference another metafile, use the ENTRYREF element. An ENTRYREF element in the primary metafile points to an external metafile.
The Windows Media Player control processes the ENTRY elements of the referenced metafile as if they were included in the primary metafile at the position of the ENTRYREF element. However, it skips any ENTRY elements in the referenced metafile that have the SKIPIFREF attribute set to YES.
The Windows Media Player 7.0, 7.1, and Windows Media Player for Windows XP controls ignore any ENTRYREF elements in the referenced metafile. Thus, metafiles can only be nested one level deep using these versions. These versions also ignore the ASX element and its attributes in the referenced file. Windows Media Player 9 Series or later supports nesting metafiles up to 5 deep.
Related topics