Silverlight really needs to get with the pre-loading and obvious controls thing.

Edit: Correction - okay, so like Paul says - it’s not Silverlight itself, it’s the templates that people are using. Still, they’re templates that come with the various Silverlight capable applications (Blend, Expression, and Media Encoder) - so they’re going to be used fairly frequently.

Here’s a Youtube video:

How do you play/pause, or skip to a certain portion? How do you know how much of the video is loaded? 

They’re fairly obvious after about 5 seconds of watching the player run. The little red bar runs to the right as it loads, and the dot follows along as it plays. Drag the dot - you start playing at that point.  

What about a QuickTime video?  (I’m not exactly a fan of QuickTime either)

  

Yep, that’s reasonably obvious too. There’s the play, skip/etc controls - and a similar style of displaying the amount of video loaded.

Now let’s take a look at this Silverlight video:

Well, we’ve got skip back, play and skip forward.. err.. how do I tell how much has preloaded?  Oh - that’s right - with this helpful little glyph:

What does the 36 signify though? It’s not until you actually watch what it does for a while, that you realise it’s not some sort of countdown timer until you can start the movie  - it’s a percentage counter of how much it’s loaded. (Silverlight will start playing the moment it has some video loaded - regardless of whether the connection between you and the server is fast enough to keep it up).

Okay, so, how do you skip forward in the video… err.. .wait… can you? Well, assuming it’s been pre-loaded - yes, there’s a little blue bar with a white gradient — that’s the play position indicator. You can drag the white bit around to set the current play position.

The only issue is - it breaks the common UI visual cues’, so it took me about 30 seconds to find the control (it’s really not obvious). What’s the likelihood that my Grandmother is going to know how to use it?