Betty, I think you're spying on my browser history, I was looking into most of that before I went to dinner...

1) I know of no one reporting the live video working. Both the highlights and the condensed games work great for me, and from what I've seen it looks like the highlights are at least working for others as well.

2) An earlier version of mplayer actuall may work better (after a fashion). Bunyo ported mplayer rc2 to the .26 version of mplayer. rc2 is suposed to be much better on wmv9 (which the video streams use). It doesn't work with the current .27 though, and I can't install the older version, dependencies are missing.

3)as far as I'm aware, mplayer is pretty much the best video player available for any OS it runs on. It runs with low overhead, and plays a large number of formats. It is originally designed for desktop linux and the x86 chip architecture, so much optimization had/has to be done to have it run well on the tablet with its ARM architecture.

4)The current version of mplayer is from april I believe, so not that old, but not that new. From comments I've read, they are waiting for rc3 to do the next major jump in porting from the desktop.

5)Video transfer rates should be no problem. I've see file transfer's at 1.2Mbps, and the highlights and condensed games both stream at 400kbps without much issue.

6)VLC isn't very optimized for ARM either. From what I've read, it is just a straight cross compile, so while I haven't had the chance to try it, I wouldn't expect it to play wmv well. wmv is one of the less supported codecs on linux since it is closed and MS.