The VideoLAN Forums

Just out of interest: as far as i know this is a problem with the ffmpeg h264 decoder that simply isn't performing very well at high bitrates - mplayer has the same problems. I am not sure what the VLC team is able to do about it unless you start to tweak the ffmpeg decoder code or integrate another...

Yes, i am experiencing the same with my macbook. I cannot play 1080i h264 content without stutter. I really hope the ffmpeg guys will optimize the h264 decoder soon. The CoreAVC guys are working on a Macintosh version, but i doubt that this will somehow work with VLC or mplayer and i need a splitter...