Re: Why can't N900 play videos smoothly?
 

Could some of you upload one problematic video so I can test what's going on? Also, I wonder why you're not using stock player (or OMP), both decode videos using gstreamer - thus HW acceleration through DSP.

Re: Why can't N900 play videos smoothly?
 

Really wierd?? Can anyone clarify about hardware revisons??

Re: Why can't N900 play videos smoothly?
 

To see the hardware revision of your N900's mainboard run this in the terminal:
cat /proc/cpuinfo

This thread talks about it:
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php...ware+revisions

If I remember correctly, there are at least 3 production revisions (plus some preproduction). Some people say 2204 is the best one, but I have no idea if it's true.

Re: Why can't N900 play videos smoothly?
 

I will have to cut up a portion of it and see if it still reproduces the issue, because this is a 1.4 GB file, and your mailbox might not be big enough for it ;)

I normally use mplayer because it is compatible with more stuff, and because I've been using mplayer forever. I use it through kmplayer for the convenience of the GUI.

Re: Why can't N900 play videos smoothly?
 

Incidentally, why does it take so frickin long to copy stuff to eMMC? Even from a 10 Class Micro SC card, it's been copying for around 40 minutes and still going. :eek:

And why is copying from a Sandisk 16GB Class 4 faster than from a Sandisk 32GB Class 10? Estel mentioned a few days ago that the best cards for swap are the Class 4 Sandisk before the 2 color scheme change. Doesn't Class designation mean anything these days? Jeez...

Re: Why can't N900 play videos smoothly?
 

Apples and oranges. Lower class may be better for swap because higher class cards are optimized for sequential read (or write) of large files (achieved primarily by using large size blocks) whereas swap generally uses small random read/writes.

You are copying a large file, presumably sequentially, so a higher class should be better. If it isn't, complain to Sandisk.

Re: Why can't N900 play videos smoothly?
 

i have same issue as handaxe, playback fine near fresh boot, goes wrong after loading several videos. That and the diagonally skewed issue i reported a while back.

Re: Why can't N900 play videos smoothly?
 

Yeah, the Class 10 was slower than the Class 4, but both were pitiful. It took about 2 hours to copy a 1.4GB file from the card to MyDocs. Surely there must be something wrong!

Can't you change the size blocks by formatting the card though? Or can you only increase / decrease the block size by formatting? I am guessing you can probably only increase it, but maybe I'm wrong.

Re: Why can't N900 play videos smoothly?
 

We are talking about different blocks. Flash memory is organized and used differently from your usual magnetic storage. For example there is no write without erase first. You can google it up but something like this might be a good starter. Erase happens in blocks. The size of the block is set in the hardware and has nothing to do with the file system used on top of that, so whatever block size you format the card for has no effect.

Re: Why can't N900 play videos smoothly?
 

Thank you for explaining that. I knew flash is a different technology in quite a few different ways from magnetic storage, but I didn't know this detail.

Isn't there additionally a problem with electric charge escaping from the memory cells over time, thereby causing data to not be retained for as long as magnetic disks? I still have hard disks from 15 years ago that (for the most part) still work. I heard somewhere that flash memory tends to lose its ability to retain data much sooner than that.

I was backing up recently a couple of old IBM Travelstar 8GB external disks which were ruggedized and had a PCMCIA interface. A relic, basically. I didn't have any problem, except for a folder where some of the files had been corrupted. I could retrieve the data because I had stored it in the other disk, but still I think the batting average was pretty good for such an old drive. Perhaps extraordinarily strong cosmic ray hit the disk at that specific spot sometime. Or maybe, as Murphy once stated, SH@$ just happened. :)