Following my recent post regarding Silverlight, unfortunately I have hit disaster.  When the audio starts, it sounds choppy with a double-echo or reverb.  In short it is unusable.  All other audio works fine, even on the same webpage, but as soon as you try and listen to a Silverlight widget it sounds terrible.

Googling “silverlight rdp choppy” in desperation has not filled me with confidence, there are a number of posts including:

• Has anyone else ran into a problem where if you use a Silverlight app over Remote Desktop and it plays a WMA or MP3 file using MediaElement, the sound is choppy?

It is possible that upgrading to Windows Server 2008 would resolve this issue; although there are issues I believe in connecting to the latest RDP version using rdesktop.

I did find this advice from Microsoft, the Microsoft RDP Client was the only sound card available, but I followed the advice anyway to no avail.

What I simply do not understand is why all other audio works perfectly via RDP, except Silverlight, especially given the fact that Silverlight and RDP are Microsoft products.

Any suggestions gratefully received!

We have to be able to play Silverlight media on our two virtual Windows Server 2003 servers.  This is completely unavoidable, because you first need to authenticate via an Active-X website, so any option of using Moonlight on Linux was impossible.

The problem that we had was that when we clicked on the Play Media button, there were two pop ups stating “This page has an unspecified potential security risk” followed by another stating “A problem was encountered with the media file specified.”

I tried bypassing our proxy server;  I ensured that the Internet Enhanced Security was uninstalled; I tried adding the relevant sites to “Trusted sites”; I tried reducing Trusted Sites to “Low” security; I brought all the critical updates up-to-date.  Nothing seemed to make a difference.

Finally, I decided to review the optional Windows updates, just to see if there was anything related to Silverlight and noticed that there was a major update to .net available “.NET framework 4”. Knowing that Silverlight is a .net technology, I installed it and, after yet another reboot, the pop ups had gone and it was working.

My reason for writing about it is simply this:  I had googled endlessly about this problem, without any success, there was seemingly nothing relevant to this problem.  Hopefully this post will help others.

But you should be using Linux not Windows!  There, couldn’t resist ;)