Seems to me, since people have been noticing this for years, they could fix 90% of the cases just by changing that default to 3:00:00, since most movies aren't that long. Or wait a little longer for the hard drive to spin up.
PS: I've always been confident that it wasn't a configured timeout, whether in networking or server inactivity or whatever, because if I'm watching a movie that's 2:15:00 long, and after an hour I pause the movie for 10 minutes to make popcorn, playback doesn't stop 2 hours after I started it, it still stops at 2:00:00 in the indicated time played of the movie.
[1] -stops-at-200/719988/5