As mentioned above, I've also played PBS HD on my 1.9 GHz computer, and it just barely worked (and has since stopped working since my computer is getting bogged down with services). But I can't come close to playing the high bitrate network HD on the computer. Low bitrate HD, such as the stuff that used to be FTA on the Anik E2 sat played easily. I forgot what the bitrate of that was, but it was on a 9000 SR mux. Also, the NASA HD, plays easily on the computer. All these examples are 1080i, so the ability to play HD depends as much on the bitrate than the resolution.
Re re-encoding, I agree re VLC being a bit complicated, but it does seem to be quite capable. I've re-encoded a couple things with VLC, but never completely understood what I was doing. I eventually just bought VideoReDo, and eventually upgraded to their Suite. I really like VideoReDo, however I have a question for anyone who is experienced with it.
Related, but a bit off topic, I wanted to take a recorded file, and convert it into a smaller file with VideoReDo, so that I could send it over the internet. I had assumed that if I reduced the bitrate, that it would decrease the size of the recorded file, however this does not seem to be the case to any significant extent. I've cut the bitrate more than in half, and it only reduces the file size by about 2%. Seems like the only way I can reduce the file size is to cut back the resolution. This doesn't seem logical to me, since you see sat feeds with greatly different SRs all giving video of the same screen dimensions. For example, if I record a football game of a high speed network 1080i feed, it creates about a 50 GB file, but a medium speed 1080i OTA broadcast only takes about 20 GB, and it would seem that the only difference would be the bitrate. But with VideoReDo, for some reason changing the bitrate just doesn't seem to affect the size of the file.
Anyway, why doesn't VideoReDo reduce the file size when you re-encode at a lower bitrate???