Background:
We have a web "app", where on one web page we have the following:
An embedded Windows Media Player object. It's surrounded by listview's on the left, and some graphical elements on the bottom. The listview's (there are a couple), allow for data entry. Therefore, dialogs pop up to allow you to enter in various text.
Because of these pop-up dialogs (not only the data entry dialogs, but regular alerts/MessageBoxes), one of the params of the embedded Windows Media Player object is:
<param name="windowlessVideo" value="true">
Otherwise, any dialog of any type will fall behind the Media Player object and you won't be able to see it. Here's an example stackoverflow solution to the dialog problem using windowlessVideo.
Here's the issue:
And we didn't see this until more and more people started using Windows 7 and Windows Media Player 12, with the windowlessVideo setting on, it causes performance to degrade. Sort of a lag. Not the type of lag where I type a few words, a second goes by, and then you see the words that I typed finally appear. No. Imagine typing this sentence:
I am typing into a dialog box some text.
When you look up, various characters will be missing and it will look something like:
amtpin int adilg box sme txt.
So, as you can imagine, this is unacceptable. People just can't type into the dialogs anymore.
Of course, when you look at msdn it says this:
In Windows Vista, rendering video in windowless mode can degrade performance.
OK, yep. I see it. Now what?
Before Windows Media Player 12, I used to be able to go to Tools -> Options -> Performance tab and under Video acceleration there would be a slider, and an Advanced button with a ton of other options. I've fixed a 'flickering' video problem before by turning the slider to None. So, I was hoping there was some Media Player setting I could modify to rectify this. Nope. There are no longer any video acceleration settings, and there are like 4 checkboxes under 'DVD and video playback' that don't affect things.
Meanwhile, if all I do is remove the windowlessVideo setting, I don't get that lag at all. I add it back, I get the lag. I take it away, no lag. But all that does is replace one problem with another. I might fix the lag, but now all my dialogs are behind the Media Player.
OK, Microsoft. Thanks! You win. But, now what? Anybody have any ideas? Thanks!
