Consistency

So, I am using the Windows Media Player control within my WPF project, because the built in control is too slow. My problem is, I want the control to not play the video right away, but to have it loaded, so there's no moment of black screen when you press play. The only way I can see to do this, is to turn off the volume, tell it to play, and when it starts, pause it and turn the volume back on. Which is, of course, messy.

What is also messy, is that when I search the MSDN, the media play control has a ton of different types of volume settings. One allows for the volume to go between 0.0 and 1.0, with 0.0 being off. At other times, the windows media player control apparently has settings between 0 and -10,000, where 0 is full volume. When I find the right documentation, for the right version of the object, it tells me that the settings property "... gets an IWMPSettings interface that provides a way to modify various Windows Media Player settings." What is a IWMPSettings interface ? What does it expose ? I did find a link which would tell me that, and, for the purposes of the COM control, under C#, the range is 0 to 100. I think. I mean, it's not really clear enough for me to be sure, given all the other options I have been given. I'll try that and see.

My point today is - why does Microsoft have to do the same thing 100 different ways ? Why can't they just decide on something and stick to it ?