Easily create an MSI for the popular Media Player Classic for deployment. 

Basics for those who don’t know!

MSI = Microsoft Installer package that can be deployed in a network enviroment.
MediaPlayerClassic = Popular media player based on the origional media player packaged with windows… its capable of playin all sorts of differning media types and also handily dvds…!!

So whilst creating some MSIs’ for work at work… I realised that none of the staff/teacher laptops had dvd software and we don’t have any site licenses for any software so i thought ok why not use MediaPlayerClassic!?

So I downloaded it and then thought… “ahh…. I have to install it on 160+ laptops…. erm…yea im not getting them out one by one and installing it on them” lol

So i went about creating an MSI with WinInstall LE. I ran the discovery (disco32.exe) which took a snapshot of the OS, then created a folder (c:\Program Files\MediaPlayerClassic), copied the mplayer classic exe into that directory and then ran disco32.exe again.

After a minute or so i had an MSI created ready for deployment… Usually we leave deployment of MSI’s until a time where no teaching is going on and teachers don’t need their laptops to turn boot speedy but as it was 2mb so is was not an issue. I added it to the “Laptops” gpo and thats it!

So if your looking for a way of allowing your users (If your IT admin/techies) to play dvds on their machines… do this its simple fast, very effective and easy to use for the less techie of us!!!

If you would like a copy of MediaPlayerClassic go here and if you want to read up on how beefy MediaPlayerClassic really is check out the wiki