Maybe it has been covered already, but I suspect that my vlc/ffmpeg is overloading the cpu when transcoding x264 to mp2v (asf container). And I do get stuttering video.
Using 'top' I can see that the cpu peaks at around 100% while streaming.

What could I do to improve the performance?

My server is maybe not the best to do these things. It's a AMD athlon 3500+ at 2.2Ghz, 4528 BogoMIPS.
I'm running ubuntu (x86_64) and I did NOT compile ffmpeg separately like suggested in the wiki (lazy, yes). I'm using the repository version for now.

So the question is, compiling ffmpeg using the guide, does this optimize the code for the cpu it is compiled under? Is it a lot of gain in compiling it myself?
Is there anything else I can do...I don't think its a bandwidth problem in my case. Couldn't it make use of the gpu (because it DOES have an nvidia 7600 card) some way to accelerate the decoding?

This smells like: Go out and by new hardware....right?