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Using the Windows Media Player Control in a Console 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 It has been superseded by MediaPlayer.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 create an instance of the Windows Media Player COM object directly by using CoCreateInstance. When you do this, the Player object displays no user interface. However, the object is still useful for tasks that don't require the user interface, such as working with the library, playing digital audio files, or accessing properties of the Player.

The following example code shows a simple console program that displays the Windows Media Player version in a message box. The example code uses ATL to take advantage of smart pointers and the CComBSTR string class.

#include "atlbase.h"
#include "atlwin.h"
#include "wmp.h"

int _tmain(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[])
{
    CoInitialize(NULL);

    HRESULT hr = S_OK;
    CComBSTR bstrVersionInfo; // Contains the version string.
    CComPtr<IWMPPlayer> spPlayer;  // Smart pointer to IWMPPlayer interface.

    hr = spPlayer.CoCreateInstance( __uuidof(WindowsMediaPlayer), 0, CLSCTX_INPROC_SERVER );

    if(SUCCEEDED(hr))
    {
        hr = spPlayer->get_versionInfo(&bstrVersionInfo);
    }

    if(SUCCEEDED(hr))
    {
        // Show the version in a message box.
        COLE2T pStr(bstrVersionInfo);
        MessageBox( NULL, (LPCSTR)pStr, _T("Windows Media Player Version"), MB_OK );
    }

    // Clean up.
    spPlayer.Release();
    CoUninitialize();

    return 0;
}

Using the Windows Media Player Control in a C++ Program