Video stutters badly when trying to watch HD material (720p) on this front end:

Chassis : Shuttle XPC SN25P barebone
Processor : AMD Ahtlon 64 3500
Primary memory : 1 GB RAM
Disk : 300 GB Sata disk
CD/DVD : Nec ND3540 DVD +/- RW (PATA)
Graphics : Club Geforce 6200 256 MB PCIe 16x (nVidia)

Should I get myself something more powerful or is there something wrong?

Cheers,
/Chris

_________________
LinHES R8.6.1
BE: AMD64X4, 4GB, Hauppauge usb tuners
FE1: Gigabyte F2A85X-UP4, nVidia GT640
FE2: Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H, AthlonX2 4850E 2.5 GHz, 1GB, ASUS GEFORCE 7200GS 256MB
FE3: Asus Eeebox410

I would think the hardware is sufficient, but you'll have to provide more details. Your bottleneck could be network too. what does top show? does the HD file play on your other FE? Does it play in mplayer? have you optimized xorg? played with deinterlace options? HD is a funny beast...

maybe:
http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php? ... SetupHowTo

Thanks for your tips!

Top shows cpu usage between 80%-100% total with mythfrontend 97,5% and xorg 2,5% when it tops. The FE/BE stutters still worse and is not expected to cope with HD (XP2200). The Wiki deals with modelines, which appears to have to do with resolution. The image quality I get is perfect, so I think this is not the problem? This is watching live TV.

I haven't tried the following (don't know how, but will find out):
mplayer
optimized xorg
deinterlace options

The network is 100Mbps and passes two switches on the way to the BE. My experience is that it should be capable of 3MBps - is that enough or is gigabit necessary for HD?

If it should work, I'll start spending some time researching.

Thanks,
/Chris

_________________
LinHES R8.6.1
BE: AMD64X4, 4GB, Hauppauge usb tuners
FE1: Gigabyte F2A85X-UP4, nVidia GT640
FE2: Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H, AthlonX2 4850E 2.5 GHz, 1GB, ASUS GEFORCE 7200GS 256MB
FE3: Asus Eeebox410

I would try to get the FE working with a known good recording (even if you have to download an HD recording from the web) located on the FE if possible. This eliminates network and recording problems. (For me, LiveTV sometimes seems to be problematic where pre-recorded from same tuner can be error free.)

Search de-interlace & bob options, if it applies to your hardware. Might buy you some CPU.

You don't need gigE for HD, but a bum switch can cause trouble.

Everything sounds OK except for the IDE drive on the backend. The short time I had an IDE drive in the BE, and this was dedicated just for /myth/tv, I felt things were just not running right and felt that playback was affected. I never ran any tests, just found a SATA at the right price to replace it with, and I'm happy again.

BTW, my setup has much in common with yours, including multiple switches. HD streams run through the multiple switches just fine.