Anyone ever use a pi playing out a stream for linking? How did you get it to handle internet drop outs? I've tried both mplayer and vlc and they both just hang if the connection goes out, won't resume when it comes back. If it actually crashed out and returned to console it would be ok cus I could set it playing in a loop. But instead it just sits there doing nothing until I manually restart it

Both vlc and mplayer have --loop as a parameter on command line but it only works if the stream itself ends. If the connection goes down it doesn't see it as the stream ending so just carries on doing nothing

Any ideas?

You are correct, VLC is not resilient enough to handle network glitches, mine used to just stop dead and you would have to log in manually. Sometimes it would stop after a week, sometimes an hour. It seems to do it on every platform (rasbian, linux mint even on mobile phone). I have seen a few threads on the net where people have told the developer but he seems to be in denial!

The way I've seen people get round the issue is to use the jack version of stereotool. There is a software called silentjack which is some kind of plugin for jack. It can detect silence and if you write a script, it can be used to refire vlc when it glitches.

It would be nice if there was a plug in for vlc to make things simple but unfortunately I don't think there is any available.