April 11 2008
I recently used the Silverlight 2 Carousel sample I wrote for the WPF Boot Camp application and encountered a gotcha that some others may hit. Each carousel contains multiple videos, between 5 - 10. Initially, the source of the video was coming from an mms:// URI, streamed from a Windows server. All worked no problem. But, the video quality was sub par and I had other videos that were better quality, but not streamed over mms://. I switched to the higher quality videos, which are buffered over http://. When I did that, the carousel would only display two videos at a time and the other panels would not display any video, even with each of the videos set with auto-play to false. I realized the reason was that the browser itself was throttling the ability of the Silverlight application to begin buffering the videos. It would only handle two at a time.
The solution? Rather than begin to buffer all the videos, I display screenshots of each video. Then, when the user clicks play, I actually load and play the video. If you want the code I used to built the site, you can download it here.
I also fixed a bug in the carousel code where layout wasn't centering the carousel, which is in the latest build of the carousel.
