MCI
[The feature associated with this page, MCI, 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 It has been superseded by MediaPlayer.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 MCI, when possible. Microsoft suggests that existing code that uses the legacy APIs be rewritten to use the new APIs if possible.]
The Media Control Interface (MCI) provides standard commands for playing multimedia devices and recording multimedia resource files. These commands are a generic interface to nearly every kind of multimedia device.