[theophile]

Ok. I have the AppleTV at my place for a few days and I just tested Sintel from a local HD. 40% CPU usage, CrystalHD decoder active. Works fine, of course, loading the info or codec overlay will make playback stutter, something only a rewind of fast forward fixes for me (that is, jumping 30s back or forth). If I don't do that, it will spend like a minute (or more) catching up and filling the buffer again. I can post a screenshot if you think that will help you.

Thanks, but I believe you. For me, there's nothing particularly helpful in these screenshots, except to prove that chd is actually working.

Could it be due to my cpu or gpu? I'm used to VDPAU, which effortlessly decodes pretty much anything in HD, and could do so on pretty much any cpu. Maybe I'm expecting too much out of this thing?

[.:B:.]

Local content can be pretty smooth, even 1080p content. It will take a while for the AppleTV to pick up the pace though and get things going , especially with 1080p encodes - there is like a minute here between clicking on Sintel and Xbmc actually displaying it. On the AppleTV Xbmc uses the default Confluence skin - no bells and whistles. On my AppleTV, streaming will tax the CPU significantly, but I believe your system should have way more headroom - you have a dualcore CPU that's at least twice as powerful per core than the AppleTV's CPU, and you have plenty of RAM. You should do some tests if you have the time.

Your hard drive's throughput should be sufficient, have you done any tests with hdparm to see what DMA mode it's in and what throughput is like? Does the onboard GPU have enough RAM assigned?