[mythtv-users] Myth playback is inefficient?

[Dylan R. Semler]

I have always (since 18.1) had trouble playing HD content on my mythbox 
from mythtv.  The specs for my combined frontend/backend are
Dell 8200
nvidia 4200 64 MB
Pentium 4 2.23 GHz
512 MB RDRAM

Playing back a recorded HD file pauses every second or so with the 
prebuffering pause messages in the frontend output.  However, /while/ 
mythtv is trying to view the channel, I can play the channel file 
(2101_20060515194118.mpg) with mplayer and it plays smoothly.  Both 
mythtv and mplayer are not deinterlacing and they both use ALSA.  This 
leads me to believe that there is something inherently inefficient about 
the way mythtv tries to playback video.  Has this been noticed before?

Dylan