For a variety of reasons, R5’s MediaPlayer plays some videos haltingly. There is however, a workaround. First, make sure you have the development tools installed. If you have BeOS Pro edition, launch a Terminal and type:

cd /boot/optional/sample-code/media_kit/MediaFile/mplay/
make

If you use Personal Edition, grab mplay from ftp://ftp.be.com/pu b/samples/media_kit/MediaFile.zip, unpack, and run make.
This will make a much more simple media player called „mplay“. Although it is not nearly as full featured as the full MediaPlayer, it does not skip video at all. To open videos, simply right click them, scroll to „Open With…“ then select mplay.
What would be really nice would be if some nice developer would hack mplay a bit and add some more features, and bring it up to speed with the full MediaPlayer….
[Editor’s note: mplay does not appear to work with DV footage captured from video cameras.]