About MCI Devices

Your application identifies an MCI device by specifying an MCI device type. A device type indicates the physical type of device. The following table lists the MCI device types you can use.

Device Type Description

cdaudio CD audio player
dat Digital audio tape player
digitalvideo Digital video in a window (not GDI based)
mmmovie Multimedia Movie Player
other Undefined MCI device
overlay Overlay device (analog video in a window)
scanner Image scanner
sequencer MIDI sequencer
vcr Videotape recorder or player
videodisc Videodisc player
waveaudio Audio device that plays digitized waveform files

The system software includes device drivers for the device types that are fundamental to many multimedia presentations. The system software includes the following MCI device drivers:

Device Type Device Driver Description

cdaudio MCICDA.DRV An MCI device driver for playing compact disc audio.
mmmovie MCIMMP.DRV An MCI device driver for playing Multimedia Movie files.
sequencer MCISEQ.DRV An MCI device driver for playing MIDI audio.
videodisc MCIPIONR.DRV An MCI device driver for playing the Pioneer LD-V4200 videodisc player.
waveaudio MCIWAVE.DRV An MCI device driver for playing and recording waveform audio.

The [mci] section of the SYSTEM.INI file contains a list of the installed device types. If you have a particular device type installed more than once, the device-type names used in the SYSTEM.INI file will have integers appended to them. These integers create unique names for each MCI device-type entry. For example, if you installed two occurrences of the “cdaudio” device-type, their unique names would be “cdaudio” and “cdaudio1”.

MCI classifies device drivers as compound and simple. Compound device
drivers use a device element—a media element associated with a device—
during operation. For most compound drivers, the device element is the source
or destination data file. For file elements, the element name refers to a file and
its path.

Simple device drivers don't require a device element for playback. Compact disc audio is an example of a simple device driver.