when does setting MediaElement.Position work or not work ?

Question

"If the media does not support seek operations, setting this property will have no effect on media playback."

 

What media do and do not support seek operations ?

Answer 1

hello.

since i think that mediaelement is built on top of media player, i believe that the some principles used for playing videos and music on are true for this element too. There are several reasons that might disable seeking when you open a file on media player. this link mentions some:

 

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/faq/playing_files.mspx

Answer 2

I am not sure it is true that the MediaElement support is based on WMP, since there is a from-scratch implementation for Mac.

 

I am particularly interested in being able to seek using HTTP "Range: bytes=" headers, in case anyone can answer this question authoritatively.

Answer 3

hello again.

yes, maybe i'm wrong since...however, there really is a media player version for mac:

 

http://www.microsoft.com/mac/otherproducts/otherproducts.aspx?pid=windowsmedia

 

maybe someone from the team will be able to give more info on this.

Answer 4

There are certain conditions under which setting the Position will not take effect, such as setting the Position on a MediaElement that doesn't have a Source, or attempting to seek a playlist entry in an ASX file that has ClientSkip="False".  Otherwise, seeking is always expected to work.  All of the media formats supported in Silverlight allow seeking.

 

Thanks,

Ed