Metafile Playlists
[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 It has been superseded by MediaPlayer.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.]
Windows Media metafile playlists are used to organize stream content and presentation. A playlist can simply redirect Windows Media Player to the content to be streamed, but more commonly will provide a list of files to be played sequentially. A more complex playlist may contain repeats, commercial inserts, and information about the items in the list.
Another advantage of playlists is that instead of playing a stream, stopping, starting the next stream, and then waiting for it to finish buffering, Windows Media Services and Windows Media Player work together to play the clips one after the other with minimal buffering time or interruption.
The following sections provide more information about metafile playlists:
- Control of Playlists
- Custom Graphics in Windows Media Player
- Displaying Web Pages in Windows Media Player
- Logging Stream Data
- Retrieving Metadata
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