

If VLC can stream your videos without interruptions and consumption of disk space, watching them outside of the website will deal with both issues, and also improve color quality (Flash player doesn't upsample chroma correctly). Which process in the task manager is causing increased CPU usage when the slowdowns occur? I am still puzzled why people like sites like this.

There are two reasons: 1) the webpage is ridiculously fat with scripts that get executed if the user runs the mouse over any controls, 2) the Flash plugin is slow to decode and especially to render any video. I have had trouble playing 1280 pixel videos with higher framerate on a Pentium 4, comparable with the speed of the machine in the OP.
