So I officially got stuck.

My XAML code was good and the tiny amount of c# was correct.  I tried a different video, tried a different format (wmv and then avi), I recreated the project, and hit a dead-end.  It would load the application, but there was no video to speak of and no runtime issues either.

So I took Victor up on his offer – I emailed him asking for assistance.  His response?  Call me – here’s the number.

If it weren’t for the fact that I have done the same when someone was going through a tutorial or guide that I’d created, I probably would have been stunned – possibly to the point of not calling, who knows.  But I’m used to telling others to do the very same, so I did just that – I called him.

So we went through the project together, but instead of coding the xaml by hand, we let Blend do it, and instead of setting it to manual, just to make sure that it would work at its default settings, to play on load, we tested it – to find the same result.  The program rendered – however – the video wasn’t present.

However, he was doing the project himself and his worked fine.  So I started to question my setup.  I’m actually doing all of this on a MacBook Pro – that’s right, a mac.  I run Parallels and up until now, I’ve had no issues with this setup.  Its been a pretty sweet setup, actually.

So I took my project, popped it onto my new shiny 8gig pen-pop sony thumb drive, and brought it to my PC which has Blend 2.5 on it.  Loaded up the project and… it ran perfectly.  Video was in tact.

So we did it again, this time starting it in Visual Studios, porting over to Blend and let the interface to the work for me – brought in the video, F5 and… nope.  No video.

Victor’s verdict as to “why”?  Perhaps its a discovered limitation of WPF – as of yet located until now.  For something as new as WPF – its quite likely that there are more.  When discovered, they get fixed fairly quickly, but at the moment, using virtualization, Windows likely does not have access to the GPU when virtualizing windows XP.

I wonder if the issue is present in Vista?