Trying to solve the HDTV dilemma

I have a basic dilemma in regard to HDTV. I can capture this amazingly high quality video (1920x1080), but cannot play it back on my system. I have a few choices here:

1. Get a faster system (no way)
2. Wait until all of this XvMC, nVidia driver, MythTV HDTV Patches to CVS version 0.15 stuff works itself out
3. Upgrade to kernel 2.6 and basically start all over again.
4. Transcode down to something more manageable.

Option four at this point seems to be to best because it also solves some disk space issues, as HDTV content usually takes up about 10 Gigabytes for each hour recorded.

I'll post more on my transcoding experience when I get a chance.