Getting back on topic...

I've done some experimenting...it seems that the problem is how other players (Canola, mYTube) call mplayer. I run into stuttering or speed-up/halt problem after using these other players for a while (10+ minutes), but when I use mplayer by itself on the root video it plays just fine.

Could it be that when one of these other players calls mplayer to do its processing for a single video, that some tuning variables don't get reset between different videos?

So far everything that I've tested is an .flv file.

It might be that the reason that I had not seen this problem before is that previously I was watching .avi's which use the internal media player engine.