Note to self: the initial period of syncronization fail with VLC opening Macromedia livestreams is a cluster of 2us network jitter hits, about 50 in rapid succession, right after it goes through trying every codec it has ever heard of against the stream. This is well within acceptable network congestion limits individually: together, perhaps not. Why is it clustering? What's not getting frobbed in a timely fashion while it skims its codec library?
Dig deeper into codec loading hierarchy.