I also often get lock ups of the player when I try to play streams.

My Internet connection is fairly straight forward. I have:

- a DSL modem
- connected to a 10Mb hub
- connected to a Win2kPro machine
- the Win2k machine has a 3Com wireless card and it set to route IP traffic between the LAN and the WLAN
- there is a NetGear ME102 wireless access point
- connected to a 10Mb hub
- which is connected to the Rio

Ok, so I guess it's isn't completely straightforward, but there is nothing unusual about it.

The Win2k box is also the Rio server and is the source of one of my streams (a raw MP2 stream from my DAB digital radio tuner). I also have the problem with once playing, streams dropping a second of audio every few seconds.

I know two things about these dropouts:

- they are not shoutcast specific because they effect both the shoutcast streams that came in the streams.cfg file and the raw MP2 stream, which contains no metadata, from my radio tuner
- they are not caused by problems with my Internet connection, again because they effect both local and remote streams

I am going to find some time later today to plug the Rio direct into my Internet connection, just to check that the drop outs can't be caused by the wireless LAN.

If you add debug output to the player it would be good if you made the player send the debug info in UDP packets to a known port on the server, I could knock up an Windows app to receive them and display them.

P.S. Once I have sucessfully started a stream I have never had a lock up and sometimes it doesn't lock up, just the stream doesn't start (and I can then try another one).

P.P.S. All of my network, including the Rio, uses real public IP addresses. There is no NAT or proxying going on, though there is a firewall on the DSL router blocking most incoming traffic (the only traffic going to the Rio will be TCP connections that it started).