I just upgraded to MythTV 0.24, and so far it’s looking great! Closed captions look much nicer and the revamped on-screen display looks very sharp. But one problem I’d seen occasionally in 0.23 seemed to be worse: tearing in video playback. I used to see tearing only occasionally in HD playback, but after the upgrade I started to see it more frequently, and in SD playback as well. After a bit of quick googling, I found a solution in the MythTV wiki. I added the following to my frontend’s /etc/X11/xorg.conf file:

Section "Extensions"
    Option "Composite" "Disable"
EndSection

After a quick restart, the tearing was completely gone. Yay!