@TomJ: As a temporary measure, are you prepared to listen via script called from command line?

BBC switched nearly everything over to HLS, HDS and DASH, which our current media player doesn't support (not sure about mplayer in repo though).

As part of my work on CorsixTH trying to get movie playback supported, I built and packaged a copy of ffmpeg 2.5.1 that I have not released as I wan't to get it to the point where it doesn't interfere with existing version just in case. CorsixTH with the movie support in the thread has all the new libs statically linked as a result.

After reading this last night, I decided to see what would happen if I built static versions of ffmpeg, ffplay, ffprobe etc. A little searching later and I found the new URLs, one for 128kbps and one 320+kbps and gave it a shot. Both stuttering a little when testing but with a few tweaks and command line options I have managed to get it to play smooth.

If your willing to put up with launching from a script until everything else is updated, I could stick a list of URLs and the static ffplay on dropbox.