[mythtv-users] X2 5000 enough to play HD?

[kanetse@gmail.com]

I have recently built myself a new MythTV system, which will
eventually become a master backend/frontend.  However, for now, I'm
testing it in frontend only mode.  I seem to be unable to play HD on
it without either stuttering or severe audio-sync issues.

The system is a:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000
Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H (AMD 780G)
2 GB RAM
CentOS 5.2

MythTV-0.21 (from ATrpms)

I was originally running it with ATI's proprietary drivers (Catalyst
8.8); however, there were other issues with, which I attribute to the
quality of the driver itself.  Recently, I popped in a nVidia GeForce
6600 (PCI-E), and set up XvMC.

XvMC is, by all accounts, working properly (for example, I see a B&W
OSD).  However, HD playback is very poor.  If closed captions are on,
the audio stutters and movement is not smooth.  Skipping ahead or back
(using the arrow keys) causes audio to get severely out of sync with
the video.  All the while, CPU utilization is around 50% on one of the
cores only; the other is nearly idle.  SD seems to play fine.

Could it be an issue of streaming the HD streams over the network?
Maybe the master backend can't supply data fast enough?

There don't appear to be any error messages in the mythfrontend.log,
except a lot of NVP: Prebuffering pause message.

My config should be able to handle HDTV even without XvMC, right?

Thanks!