Displaying a youtube video in a vmware VM performs very poorly due to the lack of hardware acceleration. Only in the host can you play such videos decently in my hardware but running a browser in the host is a bad idea security-wise made even worse by flash issues according to this
Presentation from BlackHat USA 2010 about Blitzableiter.
Remote desktop software is the answer. Provided it only displays the desktop in the client, like remote X does.
What is a high-performing hardware-accelerated remote desktop or remote X configuration?
