Reference Manual

HOW TO display local web content in the Windows Media Player.

HOW TO embed the Windows Media Player in a local web page.

Introduction

Windows Media Player can display a web page in its Video Pane while playing audio content. This feature can be used to display song titles and other useful information during playback of Internet radio stations. However, the web page must be fetched from a web server, as Microsoft explicitly states that:

The HTMLView feature does not allow you to open Web pages that are stored on the user's computer.
To overcome this restriction, the player can be started via a playlist file (.asx) served by the WebCombo® application. The displayed web page can then contain various types of active content supported by the WebCombo server component.

Playlist Files

Windows Media Player supports the ASX Media Metafile format that provides information about a file stream and its presentation. ASX files are text files containing XML elements with associated tags and attributes. Each element in an ASX file defines a particular setting or action in Windows Media Player.

A sample ASX file is shown below: 


<ASX version="3.0">
<PARAM name="HTMLView" value="http://localhost:8080/swrx.htm"/>
<TITLE>SWR3 Sample</TITLE>
<MOREINFO HREF="http://swr3.de" />

<ENTRY>
<TITLE>SWR3 WMA</TITLE>
<REF href="http://edge.live.msmedia.mdn.newmedia.nacamar.net/swr3live$livestream.wma" />
</ENTRY>

<ENTRY>
<TITLE>SWR3 MP3</TITLE>
<REF href="http://edge.live.mp3.mdn.newmedia.nacamar.net/swr3live/livestream.mp3" />
</ENTRY>

</ASX>
The global parameter HTMLView has a value that specifies the web page to display in the Now Playing pane of the Media Player.

Subsequent entries contain the URL of the desired radio stations.

Sample Page

The sample page allows one of four information pages to be displayed, and the selected page can then be auto-refreshed at one-minute intervals.

The playlist sample will run the Windows Media Player and start playback of the first station in the playlist, whilst displaying the sample page in the visualization window.

Notes

Another way of displaying useful content while audio is being played is to create a web page that contains both the desired content and an embedded media player object. A sample solution is this Embedded Player Popup Embedded Player Popup Sample

See Also

Displaying Web Pages in Windows Media Player, Internet Radio, WebCombo, AVI Files