Seems I am being bitten by this bug,
http://vimeo.com/forums/topic:8751
Where short, h264 videos with no audio play at around 4x their normal speed when they first load. Once they have played, they are fine.
Seems that adding in an audio track to the video is a work around.
Has anyone else encountered this?
I’m on a mac, Flash Player 10.
I logged a bug, http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-1368