mplayer stops after >1sec when streaming video

[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. I've done a quick
screencap of this behaviour, trying to view a BBC news clip.
<http://www.theruddicks.plus.com/videos/mplayer.mpeg> (Ironically,
when I tested that link just now, the mplayer plugin buffered it, then
stopped :D)

This is on Ubuntu 6.10

I found this reported as a bug upstream, in the Debian BTS
<http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=360916>. However,
the solution given there (create an empty ~/.mplayer/default.sub file)
did not solve the problem for me.

Why does it do this, and (more importantly!) how can I fix it?

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