Still trying to play those MKV files with VLC. Perian worked but I got impatient waiting for it to load.

I tried using Disk Utility to RAID a couple of hard drives. If it made a difference it was pretty minute though I did notice a difference in write speeds. Xbench confirmed it.

I picked up a 1.42 ghz MDD today. That helped a some. Only noticed a couple of skipped frames every minute. I guess I'll try overclocking it to 1.5 ghz and see if I can get rid of those last couple of skipped frames.