great progress being made here! and once again thanks to all devs, and particularly davilla on the broadcom crystal hd components!
having watched & waited, and seeing davilla's general post regarding svn r27450+ i have patched to this version and am re-testing clips.
unfortunately, i still get stuttering. this is being described in other posts too, so wont labour the point. audio continues, but video is choppy and often doesnt catch up by the time i stop ("menu" on the atv remote) playback, and resume playback, which fixes for a short period.
what is weird is that having played back the same couple of segments of a tv show, different bits cause the stuttering each time - as in its not a pre-defined section where there's a bit-rate spike, etc.
here is the xbmc.log (note: i think in this log, i played segment "007" ok, then "006" after which had the stuttering)
http://pastebin.com/m3c785317
here is the mediainfo output regarding the mkv file
http://pastebin.com/m33c3585a
here is the location of the uploaded segment
http://www.mediafire.com/?3wmtoyicyzw
if unable to pinpoint any specific issues, i hope it helps with the whole debugging!
many thanks again
jingo_man