[mythtv-users] A poor HD viewing experience

[Jesse Dhillon]

Hi,

I have the Air2PC 5000 HDTV tuner installed in my myth machine, and I 
can use it to get some local HD channels via QAM. The problem is, 
though, when the box tries to play the video, it is ridiculously choppy 
(half-second pauses every 1-3 seconds). Even if you have the patience to 
watch this for 5 or 10 minutes, it does not clear up, and the disk is 
thrashing the entire time (which I guess is understandable since it's 
buffering).

CPU usage jumps to around 50% for Xorg and 50% for mythfrontend. I'm 
guessing this is not the intended behavior (the choppiness), but I'm at 
a loss for how to troubleshoot it. Here are my specs:

Athlon64 3200+
1GB RAM
Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy, upgraded from Dapper)
MythTV 0.20 packages from Ubuntu repo
500GB SATA HDD (Holds OS, videos right now)
250GB SATA HDD (Holds nothing right now)
2 Air2PC 5000 tuners
nVidia 6800gt 512MB

So I'm pretty sure this machine should be able to handle this. If anyone 
has an idea as to what's useful information in this case, and how to get 
it, I would be grateful.

Also to note, I am not running a window manager. In ~mythtv/.xsession I 
run mythfrontend directly, and this could be a problem. I'm currently 
looking into how to setup a compositing window manager, or something 
like aiglx. I tried xgl+compiz, but alas, no xv meant crashes when I 
tried to play video.

Thanks,

Jesse.