Lee : The mplayer outside canola (pure mplayer) is indeed faster than any other mplayer playback "inside" application (and I mean really inside : embedded mode). So the playback will be worse in canola because we use that mode. We are trying to get another ffmpeg based back end, but it's not as simple as it may sound to get something with the same performance as mplayer.

About the bogus, yes indeed it may be something you installed that is also eating CPU and competing with canola for that. So, can you run canola over SSH? try doing a top (It won't show too much, but at least you will be able to see the other application eating the cpu at the same time. We sometimes believe it can be the crawler as it is really processor intensive and when things go wrong (some corrupted file etc) it can hook the cpu and affect the system performance.

Canola is a python application, so you will always find python on the background, but another python application can be effecting, or also not killing the possibility you've just found a scenario where canola is bringing itself down also.

See if you can send us more info on how to reproduce and we will hunt this bug down!

Marcelo