Ok no dma errors is good. How about doing another test. BTW I favor using standard instead of XVMC for playback.

Try this simple test

Record 1080i, 480i , Playback 1080i

During Playback press 'P' (pause), waiting for a second or two, and press ' P' again. Is the playback smoooth and the studdering stopped? or is it still studdering?

OK- I had pretty much the same symptoms putting a new 3.2 ghz Pentium machine into service with HD.

I mistakenly thought the videocard (a Nvidia geforce FX5200 128mb fanless) was enabled in the XF86Config-4 and XF86Config files. It wasn't. The files called the vesa drivers. After I changed the vesa entries to Nvidia, and described the 5200 card, I restarted, got the 1 second nvidia flash screen, set the playback options to Bob and XvMC. The machine stopped stuttering and dropping frames and worked perfect.

The sticky part was thought I had XvMC working.. it wasn't (just because it was selected..) I run R5D1 with Cecil's .20 on that machine, & wasn't sure about the grey OSD in that version. Answer is if XvMC is working, the OSD will be gray.

So make sure your card is enabled to offload the processor. My tests showed the processor load at 79% no XvMC, and only 35% with the XvMC working.

Hope this turns out to solve your problem...

snaproll: Thanks for the info. I know for a fact that I am using the nVidia binary drivers (logo when X starts). I also know that XvMC is enabled (grey OSD & log file info). What is weird is that XvMC actually uses more CPU than standard decoder.

RacerX: I think the answer to your question is that video may smooth out after a pause, but not always. That is using the standard decoder. I will have to try again tonight with XvMC.

Thanks,
James

I meant to post this last night, but left it up on screen.

Using the libmpeg2 decoder I get similar numbers.

mythfrontend consumes around 70% cpu (all available). Here is my load average after watching some HD television: