The MythTV documentation states the following regarding playback of MPEG2:

A Celeron 450 (no SSE) can decode a 480x480 16Mbps MPEG-2 file with 80% CPU.

I have an AMD K6 processor I have overclocked from 475MHz to 550MHz but it still plays back MPEG2 files recorded (at only around 4Mbps) on my backend very choppy. Is there anything I can do to fix this? Some kind of software setting? It seems that even when I renice the process to a very low level, it eats up all the CPU and is unable to playback. There's about 192MB RAM in the system.

what kind of video card do you have?
and do you have the proper drivers for it?
XVMC will help get the cpu utilization way down, but even if you don't use xvmc you will need xv support (which almost all video cards have with the proper driver) if you are using the generic vesa driver it drives the CPU requirements WAY up.

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I'm not sure--whatever is built into the motherboard. Are these usually not sufficient or will I need to get a new video card?

they very well may be sufficient, but the hardware detection scripts may not have been able to determine what it is, and use the generic vesa drivers.

look at the /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file and see what "driver" it is using for the video card if it is "vesa" you will need to find out what kind of video your motherboard has on it and change it to the appropriate driver setting in that file.

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Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

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