In one of my projects we have a streaming web site that needs to synchronize HTML content with a video stream down to a ~100 ms level. Currently we are using WMV and Microsoft's Mediaplayer ActiveX object for this, which basically limits us to IE as a platform.
As a prototype a while ago I tried out a Silverlight based media player (customized based on Tim Heuer's http://slvideoplayer.codeplex.com/) with Silverlight 3, synchronizing the video via javascript over the HTML bridge both ways.
Everything worked perfectly, but the web site at times uses javascript heavily (i.e. for smooth scrolling and other synchronization). During these heavy javascript usage times the video begins to stutter in the Silverlight based player. Even when limiting the frame rate of the Silverlight media player the problem remained, which pretty caused us to abandon this approach. The Microsoft Mediaplayer ActiveX control does not seem to have this problem, or only to a very minor extend.
My question is, is this a general problem that cannot be avoided (i.e. is Silverlight UI thread locked when javascript executes?) or is there a way to at least somewhat mitigate this problem (i.e. using a different media player, coding, etc.).
Thanks in advance!