Sure, playing Theora from &#60;video&#62; takes about half the CPU that the Linux Flash plugin playing h264 does. His point is that they both have to do similar YUV-RGB and rich compositing bullshit within the rendering runtime -- and they're within the same order of magnitude of performance.<p>mplayer takes a 1/20th the CPU cycles on the same normal desktop machine without even using hardware decoding optimizations. I wouldn't be surprised if its CPU usage was nearly optimal for the amount of data copying that needs to take place.