Mplayer stops playing after <1sec when streaming

[Freddie Ruddick]

Hello,

I've been trying to view the video news on bbc.co.uk, and other embedded
video-streams elsewhere on the net. I have mplayer and mozilla-mplayer
installed. When I try and view one of these streams, mplayer buffers it,
and plays around half a second of the audio, sometimes accompanied by a
few frames of the video, then returns to "Stopped". This doesn't seem to
be limited to one type of stream; I get the same behaviour with ogg
theora, windows media, real and quicktime streams.

Why does it do this, and how can I fix it?

If I download the file (only possible with some), it plays fine in the
mplayer application.

This is on Ubuntu 6.10


-- 
Yesterday it worked.
Today it is not working.
Windows is like that.