Just as a final note in this, this is 100% not an issue with gen_tcp and this whole thread can be ignored.
I still see the same type of IO graph in the original post, but now that I have flawless video playback I think it’s just a matter of how VLC actually does TCP reads compared to it’s buffer (probably stops reading once the buffer is full maybe?).
Good news out of this is that I actually have a working RTMP server with full playback support, and once I clean some things up I"ll have proper hex packages up.
