Re: Tried it... went back to OS 2007 for now
 

I'm sorry, this doesn't wash. It's great that they've introduced new APIs, even better that upstream GTK etc is being tracked now. However, this shouldn't have come at the expense of the old APIs. When MS, Apple or even Debian/other Linux distros upgrade to new libraries, they keep old ones around as well so that everything doesn't break. I typically have wxGTK libraries of about three or four versions on my systems for different apps that haven't been brought up to current.

I realize that there are extra constraints with this being an embedded platform. I also think it's acceptable to have this sort of breakage for brand-new platforms in brand-new categories. However, as the platform matures, as is surely the case with ITOS 2008, this sort of behaviour becomes less and less tolerable. I hope this is the last time that Nokia intentionally breaks compatibility. Otherwise, I fear they risk alienating 3rd party developers for the platform. Just look at all of the OSS apps that only work on specific versions of ITOS for examples of this already. Jpilot and Abiword to name two. What did this buy us? Lost apps and lost developers.

Apple, Sun, Microsoft, Red Hat, Canonical, all of them keep old versions of libraries around to prevent just this sort of thing from happening. Sure, deprecate old APIs/libraries, but at least keep them around for a release or two. Can you imagine how popular Java would be if each new release of the JDK broke _ALL_ non-trivial apps compiled against the previous version?

Re: Thoughts about OS 2008
 

Hmm, i have the idea the scrolling stops as soon as you put another app on top of the "desktop". (Watch the cpu applet!)

Maybe switching from the desktop to an app slows it down a bit, before the rss reader regonizes it isn't on top any more?

Re: Thoughts about OS 2008
 

As soon as I get (the official) OS2008 I definitely intend to pack up my old OS2007 runtime libraries and install them somewhere in OS2008. As benmhall said, that's supposed to work. I'm just hoping that there's no such silliness as forgetting to update the shared library major number in those upgraded OS2008 versions (that would be terribly incompetent if so). And even if they didn't, I'll put the libs somewhere out of /lib /usr/lib and try my old applications with a runtime wrapper.

Re: Thoughts about OS 2008
 

For those of us who are either thinking about installing 08 or have decided to wait for the official release, how about a few screen shots so we can see what it looks like?

Re: Thoughts about OS 2008
 

Here's my slightly customized OS2008 homescreen.

http://www.postimage.org/aV1FuAzS.jpg

Re: Thoughts about OS 2008
 

Reggie posted a 16 minute video walkthrough.
http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...5094#post95094

Re: Thoughts about OS 2008
 

Thanks! Not too awfully different. I look forward to seeing and hearing more about 08. More pics would be great. I will probably wait for the official release, (unless they take too long.)

Re: Thoughts about OS 2008
 

Cool. I'm watching it now. Thanks.

Re: Tried it... went back to OS 2007 for now
 

With any platform you pick your poison. I hope that maemo does NOT follow the Microsoft example and burden the OS with a lot of backward compatibility-- that comes at the expense of speed, and in an area that the tablets can't well tolerate, room (onboard memory).

I understand that you suggest keeping certain legacy libs available for a followup release or two, but in Microsoft's example those legacy libs hang on indefinitely. Remember "DLL Hell"? I don't want to see the tablets replicate that nightmare.

There may be a good middle ground here, but if I had to pick my poison, I'd pick breaking ties with legacy apps and pray that the developer incentives (like the big tablet discounts 500 people will enjoy) will help bring broken apps forward.

The end result, of course, should be that the API breaks come with reasonable benefits, and I don't just mean eye candy. I believe they will.

Re: Thoughts about OS 2008
 

I have to say that the media player is a huge disappointment. I'm used to being able to copy video from my media server to an sd card in my treo 700p w/o re-encoding or jumping through any special hoops. TCPMP plays whatever I throw at it.

Now the N800 runs a OMAP2420 microprocessor at 400 MHz. The Treo runs a Intel XScale at 312 MHz. Is the XScale that much more powerful than the OMAP2420?

The N800/OS2008 has yet to play any of my personal videos. Luckily, I didn't buy it for that, but I'm surprised as heck that it does such a poor job.

Re: Thoughts about OS 2008
 

What's the issue with these videos? Unsupported formats or poor images/sound?

TCPMP was an add-on, perhaps you should try mplayer (and wait until Serge gets his N810 so he can optimise for that hardware, etc.)

Re: Thoughts about OS 2008
 

I have used the new sleek os for allmost a week now. First of all I am somewhat impressed about 2008. Secondly ... it's not ready for prime time yet. Too many software missing, skype being the most important one. Install it now? Nah ... I'd wait for a month or 2 or untill skype etc. are ready to install. I am thinking of going back to os 2007.

Second gripe is about the video issues. I know it supports many formats. Currently I can watch video ment for iPod without any hickups. It just looks plain bad. The video itself is ment to be seen from iPod screen. Wich is far smaller than N800 video, so it's pixelorated. And nobody seems to know wich settings to use, to get the video right.

Re: Thoughts about OS 2008
 

TCPMP is a pretty amazing application. It plays anything, no worries about reformatting even. And on (at this stage) old Palm hardware, at that..

Re: Thoughts about OS 2008
 

Oh yes, I'm not knocking its abilities, it's just that it doesn't come installed as standard, nor does mplayer, and mplayer is better than the built-in video player afaik.

It would be interesting to know how TCPMP is so fast on your old Palm hardware (cpu speed? HW video accel?). There is source for TCPMP before it became Core Player (what ever happened to the promised open source Betaplayer?), might be worth a look to see if there are any improvements/optimisations for mplayer.

Re: Thoughts about OS 2008
 

AFAIK there is no video acceleration for PXA or OMAP based palms in TCPMP. There is one for Zodiac. The speed is partly due to optimizations (there is optional ffmpeg plugin which is called 'slow and bloated') and mainly because screen for palms has much lower resolution (320x320 or 320x480) so there is less pixel data to draw. Also palmos is simple so there is low/zero system overhead (flat memory, code runs in kernel mode, direct access to framebuffer, almost no context switches). I guess mplayer can now do better on 770 with same resolution than on palms. TCPMP source is here

Re: Thoughts about OS 2008
 

Anyone tested the WMV format on the native player? I am really hoping that with this video format supported I will be able to use Canola and Orb (are these working on OS08 yet?) to view my shared (windows) media center videos and recorded TV without having to process them through media converter. Possibly even the "Live TV" that is available with Orb.

Thoughts on this approach?

Re: Thoughts about OS 2008
 

One random wmv worked.

Re: Thoughts about OS 2008
 

It's going to depend on your resolution.

Re: Thoughts about OS 2008
 

Exactly. My videos (1.5 terabytes so far) are a mixture of xVid/DivX and H.264. I watch them on everything from a media server on a 60" LCD HDTV down to the Treo 700P. I'm a video snob, and they are very high quality.

I have tried mplayer (use it all the time on the desktop), in fact I just compiled it according to Serg's instructions yesterday and the N800 choked on a bog-normal avi cartoon I downloaded somewhere:
Don't get me wrong, I'm not tossing my N800, I didn't buy it for video, but the claims made for video and the 400mhz clock were a bit overstated to say the least.

And no, I'm not at all interested in re-encoding video especially for the N800.

Re: Thoughts about OS 2008
 

Have you tried things like -framedrop as it suggests?

Re: Thoughts about OS 2008
 

Sure, Lardman. I believe I tried every possible parameter.

Quoting myself above, but this question has not been answered. Anyone know? It just really puzzles me that the Treo is so much better for this on task than the NIT. I knew going in that the N800 was crappy for video, but it's a fact that it was said that OS2008 would be the cure for these problems. Not here.

Like I said, I love me some N800, but I'd sure like to hear technical reasons for it's poor performance vs the Treo.

Re: Thoughts about OS 2008
 

Yeah, wit properly configured mplayer, video playback should be really good for all converted videos. But, if you are planning to try to play non-converted videos that are of even slightly high resolution , then it won't be able to make it.

also, it might be that the xscale has far more optimized codecs. It does have quite a lot of media acceleration instructions in the chipset.

Re: Thoughts about OS 2008
 

The Treo 650 has a 320x320 resolution while N800 runs at 800x480. Wouldn't this be one reason for Treo to display faster videos?

Re: Thoughts about OS 2008
 

I only ask as TCPMP probably does it all behind the scenes without telling you.

I would have thought this will make some difference, but if the native resolution of the video is larger than this, surely the decoding will still take a similar time as it can't be shrunk until this has been at least partially done.

Me too; I'd like to know whether it really performs better due to the code/hardware accel, or if it's just down to the screen resolution.

I don't know how one would go about testing this though, can TCPMP output any benchmark information about how fast it's processing videos?

Re: Thoughts about OS 2008
 

Lessee...

For Disney's Alice in Wonderland TCPMP reports:
624x480
FPS: 24.33
DivX/xVid format

Plays perfectly.

Re: Thoughts about OS 2008
 

Just get mediaserv setup on a machine that can transcode in realtime or better. :\ It works perfectly every time and looks good to boot!

Re: Thoughts about OS 2008
 

Yes, that's what to do it you just want it to work, but I'd like to know why it doesn't work (or whether it's do do with the smaller screen resolution).

Are there any films available for download that play for you on TCPMP but not N800 (as then I can look at them too).?

Re: Thoughts about OS 2008
 

With mplayer I seem to be getting good results if I run it with -nosound, but with sound on the same files can stall completely..

EDIT: I should qualify that, as this is an OS2008 thread: The above is with OS2007, and may not be relevant.

Re: Thoughts about OS 2008
 

I tried to convert with sQuint. The output works like a charm. Looks like crap thou. Any ideas on how to increase the bitrate?

Re: Thoughts about OS 2008
 

Here's an animation: http://www.elkins.org/toad.avi

It's only 32Mb. I'll leave it up for a day or so. The site is hosted by godaddy so be warned: throughput is crappy.

Re: Thoughts about OS 2008
 

I've been downloading iPod/psp formatted video from google and it works much better now, it used to not work at all.

Re: Thoughts about OS 2008
 

I think the Media Player still can can only decode videos where horizontal and vertical dimensions are multiples of 16. I'm guessing that's why it's telling you that toad.avi is not a playable format. That aside, even if it tried to play it, 720x360 @25fps (~6.5 megapixels/sec) would be too much for the N8xx hardware also. :( Mplayer would likely do better but I doubt you'd be happy with that file as is do to hardware limitations.

Re-encoding to a smaller version works fine. Here is a quick example, 21MB 480x272 @25fps:

http://www.netfocal.com/toad-new.html

Re: Thoughts about OS 2008
 

It is possible to decode video at half resolution using some simplified calculations, but decoding artefacts are unavoidable. This low resolution decoding is enabled by '-lavdopts lowres=1' option in mplayer (also suggested as one of the methods to improve performance in 'Your system is too SLOW to play this!' warning).

I don't know if this trick is used in TCPMP by default for high resolution movies. Maybe it is better tuned there (both for performance and image quality) than ffmpeg's low resolution decoding mode. After all, ffmpeg primarily targets desktop systems and this low resolution mode is unlikely to get much attention.

Probably both (but I don't have any precise information to say that for certain). XScale has been longer around, Intel invested in developing some highly optimized functions including those needed for multimedia decoding (IPP library). XScale supports SIMD instructions which operate on 64-bit registers (adaptation of MMX extension for ARM core) while ARMv6 SIMD only uses 32-bit operands. ARM also tries to catch up: http://www.arm.com/news/18441.html

Re: Thoughts about OS 2008
 

I thought we also have SIMD instructions, the edsp stuff? No idea whether it's used by GCC though. Are there other OpenMAX libraries for things like MPEG decoding?

Re: Thoughts about OS 2008
 

Moonshine
what software did you use to re-encode? i tried the new Nokia Internet Tablet Video Converter but it choked.

Re: Thoughts about OS 2008
 

That file was done with Xilisoft's Video Converter:

http://www.xilisoft.com/video-converter.html

I also installed the Nokia Internet Tablet Video Converter. (On a Vista machine even :) ) It seemed to convert his clip just fine for me. Made a 19MB MP4 file:

http://www.netfocal.com/toad-new.mp4

From what I've seen on a couple clips the nokia app actually does a pretty nice job :)

Re: Thoughts about OS 2008
 

That is good to hear because my experience (on Vista also) has been less than encouraging, shall we say.

I shall try it out again.

Re: Thoughts about OS 2008
 

Well, it already got offtopic here, but I'll try to reply to this question.

ARM9E core used in Nokia 770 supports 'enhanced dsp extension', that's a set of instructions capable of performing fast single cycle 16-bit*16-bit and 16-bit*32-bit multiplications and some other instructions. This is enough for many multimedia compression algorithms which do not need full 32-bit*32-bit multiplication (it is a lot slower).

ARM11 core used in Nokia N800 supports SIMD instructions which treat 32-bit registers as pairs of 16-bit values (or four 8-bit values). SIMD instructions allow to perform two 16-bit multiplications in a single cycle.

SIMD instructions from XScale use twice wider operands (64-bit) and can process more data in a single cycle. New NEON SIMD instructions from Cortex cores (OMAP3) are even wider according to documentation (128-bit): http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/NEON.html

Yes, they can be used somewhat (edsp stuff). For example the following code:
compiles into
So gcc was able to insert proper instructions only in two first test cases. 'testmul3' should have used a single multiply&accumulate instruction (SMLATT), but failed and generated a much slower code. 'testmul4' should have also used a single 16-bit*32-bit multiply instruction (SMLAWB), but that's a more complicated case and we can't blame it here.

So the compiler (gcc 3.4.4) is not very clever and will lose to hand optimized assembly, especially on a bit more complicated pieces of code.

That news from ARM promised that they have plans to release more stuff (including MPEG decoding) a bit later.


edit: having a second look, testmul4 example is incorrect here (intermediate result overflows before shift), but anyway, I wasn't able to change this code to make compiler use optimal instruction.

Re: Thoughts about OS 2008
 

MPlayer on N800 (tested with OS2008) plays this video very good except for a few short scenes where it needs to drop some frames.

OS2008 package for mplayer is available in extras devel repository, check this thread for more details
http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...ad.php?p=98115

Re: Thoughts about OS 2008
 

Good work Serge and thanks for the details of the edsp/SIMD instructions above.

Simon