Re: Onboard Video Conversion for n900 (No PC needed)?
 

Yes, that is exactly what I want to do. Not really concerned about the battery drain (although it is certainly a consideration) since I have learned to always have a power source handy. Hell, I might even be at home sitting right next to my computer but I would still love to use the n900 just for the convenience.

Re: Onboard Video Conversion for n900 (No PC needed)?
 

I understand where you're coming from, but to be blunt, it will be horribly inconvenient at best. If you want to try it nonetheless, then I'd advise you look up some documentation on Linux multimedia tools. I'd expect some of the command-line transcoders could be (or might already be) ported over.
Sorry I can't be of more help.

Re: Onboard Video Conversion for n900 (No PC needed)?
 

@jaem I appreciate the replies... I am holding out hope that someone who has specific experience in this area will weigh in.

Re: Onboard Video Conversion for n900 (No PC needed)?
 

Converting videos is a daunting task for even the most modern desktop PCs.
It takes hours (at best) on a desktop PC on full power.

This means that if you started converting a video on the N900, it would take forever, and also it would deplete the battery very quickly.

Re: Onboard Video Conversion for n900 (No PC needed)?
 

Hmmm... so it sounds like there is little hope even for short movies. I thought I remembered it being pretty quick when I used to covert avis and mpegs for my ipod video on Windows XP. I know this was obviously a lot more powerful than the n900 but I guess I am just surprised when the n900 can't do something :)

Re: Onboard Video Conversion for n900 (No PC needed)?
 

bit of offtopic here, speaking about video encoding to what desktop processor n900's arm can be roughly compared?

Re: Onboard Video Conversion for n900 (No PC needed)?
 

The mplayer package seems to include the mencoder binary. So there is already a very good and flexible cli-encoder avaible. I haven't tested if the mecoder is in a working state or what codecs other than ffmpeg are included. But apart from energy drain, heavy load on the hardware or maybe reading the mplayer/mencoder documentation there should be nothing to stop the first encodes on the N900.

Re: Onboard Video Conversion for n900 (No PC needed)?
 

I'm not saying that it is impossible, I'm just saying that it can take INSANELY HUGE amounts of time and battery power.

WIth 600 MHz (and overclockability beyond 1 GHz), I would suggest a Pentium III, but we all know that mega-gigahertz doesn't tell the whole story.

The N900 has a processor which is build on the ARM architecture, while most desktop processors use the x86 architecture.
These two have very different instructions and capabilities, so there is not really a point in comparing them.

Also, the N900 has dedicated specialized processors for sound/audio and video processing. (Also for encoding for GSM and other stuff.)

Re: Onboard Video Conversion for n900 (No PC needed)?
 

I'd estimate a 7 year old PIII 500Mhz would be close, much of the conversion s/ware (like ffmpeg) has loads of x86 specific optimisations. The x86 cpus are good at this sort of thing and 600Mhz is similar to 500Mhz.

That's not to say it's that bad and I've run ffmpeg on my n900.

You can install mplayer which comes with mencoder which does exactly what you're asking. Don't know why nobody said this already.

However.

DO NOT DO THIS!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm fairly sure this will decrease the life of your device. You'll be hammering the cpu for hours and probably writing a lot to flash which will decrease overall life.

mplayer can play most video types anyway so I'm not sure why you'd want to convert anyway*. But my advice to you is to scp the file from xterm, ffmpeg it on your unix desk/lap-top and scp it back or dlna/nfs it directly to the media player. It would probably even be quicker to upload to youtube and play it back from that.

*Okay actually I DO need to do some conversion, but I'm hoping this is just a VTAG change to let the Sony PS3 be happy with the n900 camera mp4s. At worse a -vcodec copy -acodec aac -ac 2 to make it a more normal mp4

Re: Onboard Video Conversion for n900 (No PC needed)?
 

It seems to be working.
Here is a tutorial about it.

Still, I wouldn't use it on the N900 for anything but very small videos.