As you most probably know, we encode our files into the H.264 video stream format, which generally needs a bit of CPU power to playback.
We also recently switched to using the MKV container format instead of AVI which also seems to add more overhead too.
I've found many recent videos on this site taxed my CPU a bit much. If you have Intel SpeedStep or similar installed, you'll probably notice when playing one of our newer videos full screen that the CPU will go into full speed mode, and run hotter instead of saving power.
If you have an nVidia video card (which is the best supported video card brand for Linux), you can now get video decoding acceleration.
For MPlayer, use the parameters "-vc ffh264vdpau -vo vdpau" when watching one of our videos. Other video players updated recently may have similar options.
Under Debian based distributions, you'll need to install the "nvidia-libvdpau1" package. Look for a similar package under other distributions. Also, if you happen to be using Debian, you may want to look for updated video playing packages from
http://www.debian-multimedia.org