[mythtv-users] stutter problems (pvr250/celeron/1ghz/geforce2)

[Hundri Magusin]

I had FC2 installed so I decided to give myth a spin. Everything seemed to 
work correctly except that whenever I tried to play a recording or watch 
live tv I get a lot of stutter, the audio breaks up and the video then 
speeds up a little to catch up. I thought maybe it's because my FC2 
installation was a bit crusty.

Therefore I blew it away and installed FC3 with a minimal installation (not 
even KDE/Gnome). Just for kicks I also opted for reiserfs instead of ext3 to 
remove another variable from the list. I followed Jarold's guide with a few 
tweaks to point to the new packages (side note: everything ok except apt-get 
install mythtv-suite is broken due to mythdvd. I just installed the packages 
manually like apt-get install mythweather).

Once again I'm suffering from stuttering. Trying to do mplayer /dev/video0 
also stutters so this is not a myth problem. I've tried using mplayer -vo 
xv, x11, -ao oss, alsa etc to no avail.

This is a 1ghz Celeron box with nvidia geforce2 and using a pvr-250. CPU 
usage hovers around 25% when trying to play  (system usage is negligible 
too), yet mplayer sometimes prints out a warning that my cpu is too slow to 
play the video correctly. Sometimes when I try to play a recording (cat 
/dev/video0 > /tmp/test.mpg; mplayer /tmp/test.mpg) mplayer says "Broken 
frame" but proceeds anyway.

hdd dma is also turned on.  I'm using the machine as both backend as well as 
frontend.

It looks like something is stopping the pvr-250 from transmitting properly. 
I'm suspecting my via motherboard but can't be sure since it has been rock 
solid for the past 2 years.

Frankly I'm stumped and looking for ideas :-(

Help!