About the MCI Movie Driver

The MCI Movie Driver is an MCI device driver called MCIMMP.DRV. Using MCI can simplify your code development because your application is responsible only for opening the movie file, telling MCI to begin playback, and closing the movie file. Also, once you have added MCI support to your application, you can easily add support for other media devices and animation players; the MCI interface is standard across different types of devices.

In contrast, the Movie Player functions work only with the Movie Player. They can require more coding than the MCI commands; applications using Movie Player functions must open the Movie Player, load the movie, register and create the stage window, start playback, advance the frames, update the stage window, and then close the Movie Player instance.

MCI controls many device types and supports both the command-string and command-message interfaces. This section covers the basic command-message interface for animation. See the following documentation for more information on MCI:

Chapter 2, “The Media Control Interface (MCI),” for general information on MCI

The Programmer's Reference for a complete description of each MCI command message and its flags and data structures (the Programmer's Reference also describes the command strings supported by each MCI device)

The MMSYSTEM.H file defines messages, flags, data types, and function prototypes for MCI. You must include this header file in any source module that uses MCI.