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The Windows Media Device Manager API consists of a collection of interfaces and methods through which an application can enumerate and control media devices. Media devices can be physical devices, such as a portable music player, or software devices, such as decoders and encoders. An application can control media devices with generic requests because the Service Provider interface handles the operational details of the device it controls.
The architecture of Windows Media Device Manager is based on the Microsoft Component Object Model (COM). Using COM as the programming model creates an API that is abstracted from the underlying implementation of the hardware, and is extensible for support of future devices. This API also has inherently strong version characteristics for backward compatibility with earlier devices, and forward compatibility for new features.
Windows Media Device Manager provides complete encapsulation of media devices, both hardware and software. All the normal operations of a device, such as discovering device properties and downloading files, are organized into a collection of COM-based interfaces.
For optimal performance, applications should use free-threaded COM objects because Windows Media Device Manager uses the free-threaded model (in which an object can be used on any thread at any time).
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