Comment 31 for bug 790216

I now have VLC playing streaming radio with very good stability, for hours, whereas before there were interruptions every 20-30 minutes.

First, drag the desired stream from the Media Library into the PlayList, and turn-on (click repeatedly as needed, to select) 'Loop One'. Avoid playing streams while they are inside the Media Library, even though it seems to work.

Second, in Media -> Open Network Stream -> Show More Options -> Caching, increase the value to something greater than its default, which is 1000ms. The configuration range goes as high as 60000ms, just to give some idea of the available scale.

Start the stream normally, by double-clicking it (in the PlayList) or use Start icon in lower-left corner.

I'm seeing good stability beginning at 7500ms, but it's possible this may depend upon the quality of each individual stream.

Both setting 'one loop' to 'on' and setting the cache may be done most easily by editing the parameters in whatever your distro/desktop environment uses as a program launcher.

The parameters take this form:
 --loop --network-caching=5000
and, the latter would set the cache for five seconds. There is one space preceding the two hyphens.

The only disadvantage is that if you're searching the streams for audio content, there will now be a slight delay before the audio begins to play. At the default value of 1sec, this delay is almost imperceptible, but expect this to change as the caching time increases.

So, maybe not a 'bug' at all? Are others having success with this?