What I also experienced under Linux: It eats more power. When playing videos just on battery on my notebook, I could play much longer with mplayer and the CPU c

What I also experienced under Linux: It eats more power. When playing videos just on battery on my notebook, I could play much longer with mplayer and the CPU cooler stayed very slow/silent. This difference was very notable on my PowerPC notebook but also later on x86 notebooks. But I never tried it on Windows.