Media Control Interface

The Media Control Interface — MCI for short — is a high-level API developed by Microsoft and IBM for controlling multimedia peripherals connected to a Microsoft Windows or OS/2 computer, such as CD-ROM players and audio controllers.

MCI makes it very simple to write a program which can play a wide variety of media files and even to record sound by just passing commands as strings. It uses relations described in Windows registries or in the [MCI] section of the file system.ini. One advantage of this API is that MCI commands can be transmitted both from the programming language and from the scripting language. Example of such commands are After a few years, the MCI interface was phased out in favor of the DirectX APIs first released in 1995.

.avi files,