About the Windows Media Station Control

The Windows Media Station control is a Microsoft® ActiveX® control that allows an administrator to configure broadcast multicast stations, and start and stop streams. This overview describes the functionality exposed by the control for creating custom administration applications and integrating Microsoft® Windows Media™ Services into other software products.

Note   Starting with the current version of Windows Media Services, the term station replaces channel, which defines how a stream is to be delivered. However, the station objects managed by the Windows Media Station service still reflect the old terminology. For example, the event fired when a station is closed is still called OnChannelClose. Likewise, the Channels collection object contains Channel objects, which are referred to as stations. In most cases, code written for earlier versions of Windows Media Services works with the current version.

The Windows Media Station control exposes attributes for performing the following tasks:

• Creating, deleting, and managing stations.
  
  
• Creating, deleting, and managing streams.
  
  
• Creating, deleting, and managing clients.
  
  
• Creating, deleting, and managing host addresses.
  
  
• Creating, deleting, and managing Windows Media Station control objects.

The Windows Media Station control can be used directly in HTML pages (with or without Microsoft® Visual Basic Scripting Edition [VBScript]), in Visual Basic and Visual C++ applications. It exposes administration functionality for the Windows Media Station service through a set of Automation interfaces. Those same properties and events are available in any programming environment that supports ActiveX controls. For more information on Automation and ActiveX controls, see any COM/OLE or ActiveX documentation. For a list of additional information resources, see More Information and Examples in the Microsoft® Windows Media™ Player section of the Windows Media Technologies SDK.

For more information about Windows Media Services, see the Windows Media Technologies page at the Microsoft Web site. Support for current versions of Windows Media Station service is limited to computers running Microsoft® Windows NT® Server version 4.0. However, the Windows Media Station control, for administering multicasts, is also supported on computers running Microsoft® Windows® 95 and Microsoft® Windows® 98.