I need to tweak a WinXP Pro machine (well, several of them, actually) to start Windows Media Player on startup, and have it begin playing its current playlist immediately.
I've considered doing a .bat script, but I can't find the command line parameter that lets me tell WMP to simply start playing whatever playlist it currently has loaded.
Of course, if it's easy/easier to do this by setting up WMP as a service, I'll gladly do that instead.
How would you recommend approaching this problem?
Edit: Some context might help. The machines in question are rigged to behave as in-house cable TV channels for assisted living facilities and the like. They mostly show slideshows (with announcements, dining menus, etc.), and a lot of clients like to use WMP to play background music.
The machines are set to auto-install any OS updates from Microsoft. The problem is that this tends to make them reboot, which has the effect of knocking-out WMP until somebody notices and restarts it. This can result in very grumpy clients.
Thus, not only do I need to start WMP on startup, I need to get it playing whatever its existing playlist happens to be.
Best Answer
I did a little digging, and there is an auto-generated play list of most recent items located in the following directory:
Using the command prompt and simply specifying this file fired up Windows Media Player and started up the playlist with a few songs that I had dragged to a playlist, but did not save.
You should be able to add a simple start menu/registry command that launches Windows Media Player targetting the file above.
I got this to work in Windows 7 with Windows Media Player 12, but there shouldn't be any issues updating the paths for XP and Windows Media Player 11 should have the same folder structure.