Well normally, my MythTV box can play back anything I throw at it, without even a hint of stutter. To get it to that point, I've patched bugs in MythTV, installed an NVIDIA GT240 video card for pure VDPAU playback at the highest quality settings, made the appropriate configuration tweaks to have the HDMI output match the refresh rate of the source material (the video file), etc..

I'm not used to seeing stutter or even the slightest jitter from anything on it. So kinda surprising to get it from a 3GB video file. Definitely a buffering issue, because one can hit the "15sec back" button and have it replay the stuttered scene (from the page cache) without any hint of stutter second time around.

I might poke at it more if I see the problem again with some other file.

Cheers