Silent Acquisition Registry Setting

[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 It has been superseded by MediaPlayer.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.]

Microsoft Windows Media Player uses the following registry value to determine whether to enable silent acquisition, a state in which the player downloads usage rights automatically when the user plays or syncs protected content.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\Preferences\SilentAcquisition

The SilentAcquisition value has the following form:

Name Type Description
SilentAcquisition REG_DWORD Set this value to 1 to enable silent acquisition, or set it to 0 to disable silent acquisition. The default is 1.

 

To specify a value, the user can start Windows Media Player, open the Options dialog box, click the Privacy tab, and then select or clear the Download usage rights automatically when I play or sync a file check box. Selecting this check box sets SilentAcquisition to 1; clearing the check box sets it to 0.

Registry Settings