About Windows Media Player SDK Versions
[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 It has been superseded by MediaPlayer.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.]
The current version of the Windows Media Player SDK is version 12. The Windows Media Player 12 SDK builds on the features introduced in previous versions of the Windows Media Player SDK, beginning with version 7. The information in this documentation includes features of the following Windows Media Player SDK versions:
- Windows Media Player 7 SDK
- Windows Media Player 7.1 SDK
- Windows Media Player 9 Series SDK
- Windows Media Player 10 SDK
- Windows Media Player 11 SDK
- Windows Media Player 12 SDK
Each SDK version is associated with a release of Windows Media Player. For example, the Windows Media Player 10 SDK introduced new features supported by Windows Media Player 10. Note that no update to the Windows Media Player SDK was released with Windows Media Player for Windows XP.
Throughout the documentation, versioning requirements are provided for each feature, where appropriate. If no specific version information is provided, the feature was introduced in the Windows Media Player 7 SDK and is supported in all subsequent versions.
For information about how to upgrade projects based on the Windows Media Player 6.4 SDK to use the object model for Windows Media Player 7 or later, see Object Model Migration Guide.
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