[tdowns]

zane,
I believe the player automatically begins playing the video when it had buffered a sufficient amount of data to play continously. I believe clicking the play arrow prematurely will force the play and you may run out of data before the video has played through. Auto play is based on the buffering at a specific data rate, so if the bandwidth of the connection varies, the dropouts will be more prevalent......I'm guessing.

Thanks again for the posts.