I managed to get HDTV playing using XvMC. After a few days, I'm convinced that XvMC although helps to get my AMD 2.4 working with HDTV is also causing problems with playback. I get about 5 minutes into a show before playback stops (processor utilization drops at the same time), and I can't FF or RW properly. I think my fix is going to be a hardware upgrade.

Any suggestions from fellow board members?

Thanks!

The Dragon spec MB and CPU (MSI Neo4 Platinum and an AMD64 3200) aren't too expensive. Some people have opted for the non platinum version of the MB, although I believe you lose the firewire onboard.

They work very well for playing back HD content, as they are part of the KnoppMyth Reference Platform. The dragon spec has you replace the HSF on the CPU to a silent zalman cooler. Anxious to get my system built, I didn't want to wait for the last part to arrive (the zalman cooler) so I put the stock cooler on it and it's still very quiet.

I'm an AMD fan from waaaay back. Of the 8 computers in my house, 6 are Athlons of various sorts. BUT... The Pentium 4 has an advantage when it comes to software decoding MPEG files. On a very few tasks, clock speed is king. I have a 3.0 GHZ hyperthreading P4 and it absolutely rocks on my 1080i HDTV.

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I just wanted to thank everyone who responded to this post. This past weekend I upgraded to a Dragon spec front-end, and the experience was like rediscovering MythTV and HDTV all over again. Smooth playback w/o the pauses and skips I encountered on my old 2.4 GHz system.

There is DEFINATELY something to be said about a reference system.