MCI Devices

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[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 It has been superseded by MediaPlayer.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.]

Every MCI multimedia device supports a core set of MCI commands in a way that makes sense for that device. For example, the play (MCI_PLAY) command causes the open device to play a file or track, no matter what kind of data the device works with. The following topics discuss MCI devices and how they respond to standard MCI commands.