I used to use mplayer(of which mpv is a fork) to watch pirate streams of premier league games several years ago, via acestream. Since this was live, lag was a real issue; you can't buffer ahead when there's nothing to buffer yet. Eventually I figured out that mplayer had settings to do things like buffer for 2 minutes at the beginning of the stream before playing. You could also configure it by megabytes pre-buffered. This solved my lag issues very neatly. I can't remember what the settings were, it's been a long time and I don't have those config files anymore. But it should all be in the docs somewhere.
I used to use mplayer(of which mpv is a fork) to watch pirate streams of premier league games several years ago, via acestream. Since this was live, lag was a real issue; you can't buffer ahead when there's nothing to buffer yet. Eventually I figured out that mplayer had settings to do things like buffer for 2 minutes at the beginning of the stream before playing. You could also configure it by megabytes pre-buffered. This solved my lag issues very neatly. I can't remember what the settings were, it's been a long time and I don't have those config files anymore. But it should all be in the docs somewhere.