Are you aware that Myth trunk now supports the new (non-free) NVidia video API - VDPAU.
That means that an FE with a £30 fanless graphics card will do H264 HD with no CPU usage to speak of
MythTV svn trunk is still a train wreck (too many new features all at once, and a likely multi-year release cycle).
But.. I backported
vdpau to 0.21-fixes (the stable stream), and so did several other people! The best backport (which I'm now using) is
here.
Seems to work without much fuss on the fanless 8300GS card here, though the GPU on it is too slow to do the best "Advanced" modes at 1080i. But no problem with the "Temporal" de-interlacing modes and it still looks better than the best software method.
When playing back 1080i content, the playback chews up about 10% of a 2.6GHz Core2 CPU. It used to demand 100% with the best software method.
The guy that did this backport even has packages for Mythbuntu, so the average dude(-ess) shouldn't have to fuss about with messy source code and patches.
Cheers!