Connecting to Windows Media Player

[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 It has been superseded by MediaPlayer.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 Player automatically connects to DSP plug-ins that have been installed and properly registered. DSP plug-ins must call IWMPMediaPluginRegistrar::WMPRegisterPlayerPlugin to create the registry entries necessary to allow Windows Media Player to recognize the plug-in and to list it on the Plug-ins tab of the Options dialog box. To remove the registry entries created by IWMPMediaPluginRegistrar::WMPRegisterPlayerPlugin, the plug-in calls IWMPMediaPluginRegistrar::WMPUnRegisterPlayerPlugin.

DSP Plug-in Developer Overview