Yeah, Media Player does a much better job of it, still not perfect, but a lot fewer hiccups. Interesting. GStreamer (the framework that Media Player is built on) is much better at network streaming than MPlayer. I get the feeling that network stuff is a late add-on to MPlayer, with a lot of work still yet to be done...

I'm coming to the conclusion that the developers should spend their time making the GStreamer codec support more robust, especially the FFMpeg plugin. That's the same codec "engine" that drives MPlayer, so in theory, they should be able to get Media Player playing all the same stuff that mplayer can play...