Playing videos from kontact

I have a motion sensitive video monitor and I get a lot of 6 second videos in 
email.  I play them from kmail, using the "Totem" movie player.  The issue 
that I have is that playing is more than a little erratic - sometimes I get 
the player control overlaying the video, sometimes they're up above.  
Sometimes the player doesn't automatically start, most times it does.  
Sometimes the player simply freezes and I have to wait 30 seconds for it to 
start playing again.  

Out of all of these the first is the most intrusive since I can't see the 
video through the controls.  Yes, I can hide them by moving the mouse to the 
video, give it focus and then pressing ctrl-H, but I'd really prefer that they 
just don't appear over the video.  The really frustrating thing is that the 
problem comes and goes - for a while it'll be working well and then return to 
having the controls over the video, a week later it'll be back to working 
well.

If kmail is just using the system file association and not modifying the 
command line options then I'm at a loss to understand why things keep 
changing.

Assuming that there's no solution to the issue what video player would you 
recommend to use?