1) Yup, the silver Hauppauge remote drives the system.

2) Yup, you're correct: you add a new channel lineup for your HD card, then set up a new tuner (with DVB drivers), attach new lineup to new tuner, rerun mythfilldatabase.

3) I will try to play the clip at some point and see what it looks like for me.

4) All this is on the forum elsewhere, but enabling XvMC for MythTV playback requires you to go to Settings->General->Playback (I'm pretty sure it's some such path), then page through a few of the settings pages until you get to the one that says "enable hardware XvMC support" or wording like that.

You will know if it's on because (a) the on-screen display (OSD) shows up in grayscale instead of color, (b) playback stutters when the OSD fades on and off, and (c) your frontend will occasionally crash. By searching the forum, you should find directions for turning the OSD fade off, which helps with the brief stuttering during playback.

I usually turn XvMC support on when playing HD recordings, then go and turn it off again for SD MPEG2 recordings due to the problems listed above, as well as due to a slight stutter that shows up with SD recordings when XvMC is on.

Ok, I just downloaded and tested that same video file on a Windows laptop here at work. It's a 1.8Ghz p4m with a gig of ram. And I was right ... the video is playing slow at home. it played smoothly, but it was slow, almost like the audio/video was out of sync. On here, the narrorator is speaking through the entire clip, but at home he's speaking for about half.

So I'm going to try again when I get the psu for my shuttle. It's a 2200+ vs this 1.2Gzh athalon. The shuttle also has faster memory too. So we shall see.

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Backend:
AMD 1.2GHz
512MB Ram
20GB OS
160GB + 250GB + 250BG (LVM)
PVR-250 + PVR-150


Frontend:
Shuttle XPC
AMD 2200+
512MB RAM
300GB External USB for downloaded content
gForce 5200FX
Connected via DVI to a 56" HDTV