Accessing content from the stand-alone Windows Media Player

When you install Windows Media Player, it configures your computer to make associations with specific types of media, based on the protocol and file extensions. This means that you can use Windows Media Player to access any type of file that helps you receive ASF content.

To access content with Windows Media Player, from the File menu, click Open, then type a location into the Open dialog box.

You can use many different protocols and open many different types of content using Windows Media Player. For more information on opening content from applications other than Windows Media Services, see Windows Media Player Help.

Playing stored .asf files

To play a stored .asf file from a Windows Media server, in the Open dialog box type:

mms://server/file.asf

If the Windows Media server is configured to stream using HTTP, you would type:

http://server/file.asf

The server streams the file from the ASF content folder (for example, SystemDrive\ASFRoot) to the client. When a Windows Media server has HTTP streaming enabled, the server still uses the ASF content folder as its Home directory; the server does not use the HTTP virtual root (i.e., SystemDrive\wwwroot) as the Home directory.

Playing content via ASX files

You use ASX files to access .asf files from a Windows Media server, broadcast unicast publishing points, or multicast stations. The ASX file is a pointer to ASF content. To use ASX files with a stand-alone player, you must know the path to the ASX file. The most common way of accessing ASX files using the stand-alone player is to type the path to the file in the Open dialog box. This path can be a shared folder or a Web site. For example, to access a shared folder, type:

\\server\share\file.asx

Or, to access a Web site type:

http://server/file.asx

Windows Media Player downloads the ASX file, parses out the path to the ASF content, and then streams the content from the server.

Playing content from HTML pages

When an HTML page contains an embedded player (the Microsoft ActiveX control), you do not need to use the stand-alone player to access the Web page. If you choose to use this method, you can, but the preferred method is to open your Web browser and access the HTML page. To access Web pages with Windows Media Player, in the Open dialog box type:

http://Webserver/page.htm

Windows Media Player passes the URL to the local browser which opens and finds the Web page. Once you load the HTML page, the embedded Windows Media Player appears and begins rendering the ASF content associated with it.