Version: (using KDE KDE 3.2.2) Installed from: RedHat RPMs The ability to buffer a stream locally would be quite useful. When viewing a video over a slow connection, it is quite convenient to have the player first buffer a certain amount of data before starting to play. Thus the stream plays steady. It is also nice to have the playing of large video file started without waiting for the file to be fully downloaded. For example the mplayerplug-in http://mplayerplug-in.sourceforge.net does this as do all Win/Mac media players, AFAIK. There are a number of schemes that can be useful here. For example in the mplayerplug-in the stream is saved to a local temporary file and as a certain proportion of the file (by default 30 %) is downloaded, the playing is started. Also replaying the file is fast since it is cached. It could be improved though, for example by taking into account the transfer speed when deciding the moment to start the playing.
AFAIK, mplayer already has that feature (cache setting in ~/.mplayer/config), no? Also, kmplayer has a configure option for that especially for streaming. Because a cache setting of eg 8Mb might be nice for a DVD but not for a movie trailer. Depending an users network speed, it would be more like 128kb. For Xine, I'm not sure. There is a input.mms_network_bandwidth option.
This project is unfortunately no longer maintained. If a new maintainer wants to step up and take care, the project is archived here: https://invent.kde.org/multimedia/kmplayer You can just clone it in your private namespace on invent.kde.org and if you have started to work on it and fixed/implemented something get it reviewed and the project unarchived. Sorry for the inconveniences.