I cant seem to get VLC (or mplayer) to do a good job of displaying HDTV recorded by my MCE machine. Audio in VLC is very choppy, and the video seems slow. Mplayer just makes a lound noise and does not display any video. I have a 24" iMac and it does not seem to be CPU bound. I have tried many suggestions from the VLC forums without sucess. So I though I would try hear. Anyone getting good HDTV playback (dvr-ms) on a Mac?

I have some .ts files, also HDTV, but not from MCE. They play fine on my Mac Mini in VLC. No problems at all.

Same here -- no problem with ATSC 1080i playback on my 1.66 GHz CoreDuo Mac Mini.

It sounds as if there's something funny about your files. Have you tried running them through HDTVtoMPEG2 (http://www-personal.umich.edu/~balazer/HDTVtoMPEG2/index.html) or VideoReDo Plus (http://www.videoredo.com/) on the MCE side? I've used VideoReDo Plus a few times and it gives a wealth of information and it lets you fix several different kinds of MPEG2 data corruption issues. If you don't have access to a Windows box anymore, or if you don't have Boot Camp installed, you may want to try MPEG StreamClip (http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/24055) on Mac OS X. It's free, except for the $20 you have to send to Apple for their lame QuickTime MPEG2 component. VideoReDo Plus is far-and-away the most capable program of the three.

From what i understand, VLC does not play dvr-ms files. You need to convert it to a compatitible format.

A quick google search yields:

Two suggestions for programs that might help you.

1) DVR2MPG: very simple, free tool to "convert" .dvr-ms files to mpg. As I understand it, .dvr-ms is natively mpeg2 with ac3 audio, but it's packaged differently (maybe as a "stream?"...I probably sound stupid...maybe somebody smart can clarify). This tool just re-packages quickly into a more "regular" file. With my HD tuner, I record video at roughly 8GB/hour...this tool will convert an hour of hd video in a matter of a couple minutes or less.

2)DVR-MS Editor: another very simple tool for editing .dvr-ms files. So, you can edit them in this, input them into DVR2MPG, and have regular old MPEG2 files that'll look beautiful in VLC.

I found both of these pieces of software through here:
http://watchhdtv.net/download.aspx
Just scroll to the bottom and you'll see the links. I think you need to have Microsoft.NET framework 1.0 and/or 2.0 installed for DVR-MS Editor to work.

One more note: when you click the link for DVR-MS Editor, the page looks all complicated...but if you're like me and don't know anything about stuff, don't get discouraged. Just download "dvr-ms sample code.msi", run it, and find the DVR-MS Editor within the folder "...\DVR-MS Sample Code\Applications"

VLC does support dvr-ms files, acording to the VLC documentation. The format is just some some meta data wraped around an mpg2 stream. VLC plays them fine on my PC. They just don't play well on my core 2 duo iMac. Even if I convert them to "plain" mpeg files, they audio in particular skips.

VLC does support dvr-ms files, acording to the VLC documentation. The format is just some some meta data wraped around an mpg2 stream. VLC plays them fine on my PC. They just don't play well on my core 2 duo iMac. Even if I convert them to "plain" mpeg files, they audio in particular skips.

Looking at VLC documentation here: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/features.html I see no listing of "dvr-ms", so I am not sure where you have this information from.

If, as you say, it is a mpg2 file, I suggest you try this: right-click on the file and look for a menu item that says "Show package contents". If you select this, the file should open like a folder with other files inside. If, as you say, one of them is a mpg2 file, simply drag that file onto your desktop or someplace on your computer so that it no longer is in the container. Then try opening that file in VLC. I have done exactly this with EyeTV files and it worked perfectly in VLC.