I've spent some substantial time converting our video serving over to Silverlight, but now I'm considering going back to embedded Windows Media Player. Why? Because Silverlight video streaming is very slow when compared to Windows Media Player. At least that is my experience.

We run Windows Media Server on a Windows 2003 machine to stream video over http protocol. With the embedded Windows Media Player on a web page the video begins almost instantly, as does moving the position bar to another location in a long video.

With Silverlight loading is typically slower, but moving the position bar to another location is REALLY slow. Sometime 8 seconds or more compared to a second with Windows Media Player.

Is this issue addressed in the Silverlight 2 beta?

Hi,

About your question, SL v2 Beta has a lot of goodness in this regard: it supports byte range requests, and it throttles the progressive download, so you should see improvements compared to SL v1.

Now a question for you: are you using the Silverlight Streaming service or are you referring to the streaming functionality of Silverlight?

Cheers.

Thanks for the response. As I wrote in the original message we use Windows Media Server running on Windows Server 2003 -- so we are not using the Silverlight5 streaming service from Microsoft (which is not really streaming by the way).

When servered from a Windows Media Server there is no progressive download as far as I can see. It is true streaming.

The problem is a WMV file steamed to Windows Media Player has almost instant response when moving the slider or loading initially; however, when streamed to the Silverlight plugin the response times are markedly slower.

Hi Joe, 

Did you solve this problem? If so, can you please tell me how. We have the same problem. We're using SL v1, backend Windows Media server.  Had no problems when we used the media player, but with silverlight, getting the video to render after moving the slider is too slow.

Also, are there any good sample implementations that  someone could point me to?

Thanks.

Shefali

Hi Shefali. No, I have not solved the problem. Rather than beat my head against a brick wall I took the obvious better course of action -- we simply went back to using embedded media player and dumped Silverlight.

With all of Microsoft's obvious push to move folks to Silverlight this seems like one of the MOST fundamental issues to solve or provide an explanation for.

If Windows Media Server on Windows Server 2003 cannot deliver Silverlight WMVs at least as quickly as embedded Media Player, something is wrong.

Perhaps it is my lack of knowledge. Even if so, I have been able to obtain any advice on this. That's a pity as I put a great deal of time into coding our sites to use Silverlight, encouraged our users to downlaod, and then had to go back to Media Player due to the slow response of Silverlight on Windows Media Server.