How to interact with Windows Media Player in C#

Just add a reference to wmp.dll (\windows\system32\wmp.dll)

using WMPLib;

And then you can instantiate a media player

var Player = new WindowsMediaPlayer();
// Load a playlist or file and then get the title 
var title = Player.controls.currentItem.name;

See Creating the Windows Media Player Control Programmatically for more information

For remoting the Windows Media Player, you can use the IWMPRemoteMediaServices interface to control the stand alone Windows Media Player. And you should be able to read all the informations you want like title or filename from your WMP player object. Unfortunately there is no C# smaple code in the SDK included. You can get the files from here: http://d.hatena.ne.jp/punidama/20080227 Look for the file WmpRemote.zip Originally it's from here: http://blogs.msdn.com/ericgu/archive/2005/06/22/431783.aspx

Then you have to cast to the WindowsMediaPlayer object: RemotedWindowsMediaPlayer rm = new RemotedWindowsMediaPlayer(); WMPLib.WindowsMediaPlayer myPlayer = this.GetOcx() as WMPLib.WindowsMediaPlayer;

and there you go..

I had this https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/vstudio/en-US/dbd43d7e-f3a6-4087-be06-df17e76b635d/windows-media-player-remoting-in-c?forum=clr in my bookmarks but have NOT tested it in anyway. Just a pointer in the right direction. It's nothing official and will require a bit of digging, but you should get a fairly simple wrapper (which will still use PInvoke under the hood - but you won't see it) around Windows Media Player.

Hope that helps.

Oh, I misunderstood. I thought you were talking about controlling the currently running Windows Media Player instance. If you are hosting Windows Media Player yourself then WMPLib is certainly the better solution.