Testing network performance

[Karamano]

My 54Mbps router can not transfer this fast enough for the pi to play smoothly. It only manages to buffer 2 seconds from the clip even if I pause in advance, because then it will wait for the clip to play those 2 seconds and only then rebuffer again the next 2 seconds and so on. If there was a way to make the pi buffer more than that in advance then it might be able to produce a watchable file by pausing for some time and letting the pi buffer enough of the clip off the slow network.
But the 2 other clips I talked about a few comments back were 720p and the network can certainly handle them in terms of speed. Something else is making them stutter during network streaming.