Background Plug-ins
[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 It has been superseded by MediaPlayer.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.]
Background UI plug-ins do not actually have user interfaces unless they implement property pages. When one or more background plug-in is running, a special icon appears in the Windows Media Player display next to the running track time. This icon can be clicked to display the background plug-ins options in the Options dialog box. From there, the user can choose to open the property page of any plug-in that supports one.
Background plug-ins are useful for providing automatic services that do not require user input.
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