I just realized something else regarding your bug report -- when you were using the GUI (Graphical User Interface) version of the player, were you using mplayer, gnome-mplayer, or Totem Movie Player (or maybe something else)? On my system I find the graphical gnome-mplayer starts fine but takes much longer to buffer the stream than the non-graphical CLI version in the terminal.
I just realized something else regarding your bug report -- when you were using the GUI (Graphical User Interface) version of the player, were you using mplayer, gnome-mplayer, or Totem Movie Player (or maybe something else)? On my system I find the graphical gnome-mplayer starts fine but takes much longer to buffer the stream than the non-graphical CLI version in the terminal.