[indigest]

That would be similar to my use case (Myth + HDHRP), and the jerky scroller would irritate me. However, I believe ESPN is 720p, so deinterlacing is not an issue. Maybe scaling? Try sports on CBS or NBC, or the ticker on CNN - they're 1080i.

I resolved this by changing AFTV display settings to 720p 60Hz. I'm not sure why this made a difference since my TV supports 1080p which I believe is the default auto-output format for AFTV. I decided to fiddle around with this setting after doing a factory reset and noticing that the introduction video had some jerkiness in the included clips. In addition, Netflix and Amazon Video streaming showed this slight jerkiness.

In retrospect, perhaps it should have been obvious to me as the XBMC ticker was very jerky when I had display set to Auto. After setting display to 720/60Hz, the ticker became smooth and MPEG2 videos played smoothly. My remaining issues are occasional crashes and lack of de-interlacing support for MPEG2. I'm considering setting up transcoding to H.264 for recorded videos, although I'm hesitant as my mythbackend machine is pretty wimpy.