Sorry, I cannot help you with this for two reasons: 1) it’s more of a rant than a questions, and 2) I don’t blame you for being annoyed because I’m stuck using bink, and your problem is just one of many I have with it.
It’s simply not as easy to use or polished as the standard media player and, while bink may be an excellent codec at compression, a lot of things I could really use don’t work right.
For example, looping will look jumpy, even if the first and last frames were made with the same image (I guess it has to do with progressive encoding). Jumping to a frame seems kind of random - I need to loop from the end to a specific frame. The lead-in video is a few seconds, then there’s a looping part. The end event only seems to triggers once, even if I re-attach the event listener on each iteration. If all the videos I had to play were a fixed length, it wouldn’t be a problem, but they are dynamically loaded.
I don’t know what to say - just jumping on the bandwagon. We use it for broadcast because I’m stuck with huge files that need to be as efficient as possible, but then (as the programmer) I get stuck with all the drawbacks of things that work just fine with the standard media player.
It’s quite the headache.