Stuttering video?

[Bart Silverstrim]

Do other people notice performance "difficulties" with tasks like 
viewing YouTube videos on Firefox with Ubuntu 7.10?  I notice that on my 
system (more than a gig of RAM, it's at least 1.1 ghz for the processor) 
there's quite a bit of stutter.  The system load isn't high at the time. 
  Is this a limitation of the plugins for Linux Firefox?  I'd wonder if 
it's my broadband connection, but the meter at the bottom of the player 
shows that there's quite a bit of cached video ahead of the current read 
point.

My daughter has a system that, while not as high as my system is 
comparable to the specs I named above and she complains about this issue 
  (running xubuntu 7.10); it should have more than enough horsepower to 
play these videos under Windows, but I don't know why it would stutter 
under Xubuntu (and my system with Ubuntu) unless it's a problem with the 
implementation of the plugin or codec running in Firefox or I have 
something misconfigured.