MSN Soapbox

I've just received my invitation to participate in beta testing of MSN Soapbox. MS's "me too" technology for YouTube. Unfortunately my test didn't went well at all. I remember I was able to view videos from Soapbox before (before I was invited) and it looked pretty cool. I guess I was viewing it in somewhat different way. Anyway, when I tried browsing the MSN Soapbox library I wasn't able to view ANY video at all. They all seemed to be streaming and I could here the sound playing, but the video window was all black, and sometimes saying "Loading..." when buffering. Well it's beta testing so maybe errors like this are acceptable. One suggestion I have of why could it possibly be black to me is that I don't have appropriate codec installed and though the DirectShow graph can't be built...(does it use DirectShow at all?).

Another tricky question on MSN Soapbox is it's video player. It doesn't look like Flash or WMP control to me. So I suppose that's something different. I've asked this question on WMTalk group and for now all we came up to is that that's not WPF/E for sure, as soapbox was released to beta a bit earlier then CTP of WPF/E was released. So I suppose that's some kind of custom ActiveX they are using...but why would they not use WMP embedded? If anybody has any clues please post them here! ;)