Windows Media Player 11 SDK Managing Media Items 

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Managing Media Items

A Media object represents one media item. It has properties and methods you can use to retrieve information and display it to the user, or to take different actions based on the value you retrieve.

Much of your work with Media objects involves metadata about the content of the media item, called the attributes. The topic Media Item Attributes describes how to read and change attribute values. In addition to this topic, see the Windows Media Metadata Usage Guidelines on the Microsoft Web site for more information about the attributes and their use.

The Media object has properties and methods that retrieve some attributes directly, such as the name or duration of the item. For video items, you can retrieve the height and width of the image, and you can retrieve marker information based on the name or index of a marker. You can also determine whether a particular media item is included in a particular playlist.

Retrieving a Media Object

You can quickly access the current media item by using the Player**.currentMedia** property.

Throughout this topic, the Player object was defined in the following manner:

AxWMPLib.AxWindowsMediaPlayer Player;
using WMPLib;

The following C# example retrieves a Media object representing the current item.

IWMPMedia media;
media = Player.currentMedia;

You can create a new media item from a digital media file by using the Player**.newMedia** method. You pass the method the URL path to a digital media file, and it returns a reference to the new Media object. The method does not add the new object to the library directly. However, you can pass the object to the Playlist**.appendItem** method or the Playlist**.insertItem** method.

The following C# example creates a Media object based on one of the digital media samples installed with the Windows Media Player SDK.

IWMPMedia media;
media = Player.newMedia("C:\\WMSDK\\WMPSDK10\\samples\\media\\laure.wma");

Note   You must include two backslash (\) characters (or use the @ character in C#) in a string to represent one actual backslash character. This is because C# uses a single backslash character to define an escape sequence.

You can create a new media item from a digital media file and add it to the library in one step by using the MediaCollection**.add** method. Like the Player**.newMedia** method, the add method takes a path to a digital media file.

The following C# example creates a Media object based on one of the SDK sample files and adds that object to the library.

IWMPMedia media;
media = Player.mediaCollection.add("C:\\WMSDK\\WMPSDK10\\samples\\media\\laure.wma");

You can retrieve a Media object representing a media item in a playlist by using the Playlist**.item** method. The following C# example retrieves the sixth media item from the current playlist.

IWMPMedia media;
media = Player.currentPlaylist.get_Item(5);

See Also

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