Best Handheld for playing back high res/bitrate videos?
 

One thing that really has disappointed me in my Nokia N800 and other handle is that they can't handle high resolution videos. Even 640x480 high-bitrate video can't be played back without shuttering or dropping frames. Of course playing back unconverted 1920x1080,1280x720, or even smaller video is unwatchable.

What I have been looking for is Handheld device that can play back my high-resolution, bit-rate anime video files without any problems. Most of these files are encoded in x264 (not same as H264 codec). I am trying find handheld has good resolution (800x480), like N800.

Any suggestion on handhelds that can actually handle high-resolution/bitrate videos? Probably a handheld with hardware decoding for videos (like ATI Imegeon + TCMCP) should be able to handle it. But I haven't really heard any verified information about this yet.

Re: Best Handheld for playing back high res/bitrate videos?
 

Any new device with Cortex A8 + PowerVR SGX has the potential to do so. The software is the current limitation:

Omnia Pro, Omnia II, iPhone 3GS, Nokia RX-51, Motorola Sholes, etc

Re: Best Handheld for playing back high res/bitrate videos?
 

ysss and iPhone .... we know... forget about it! since when iphone has high res? with its 480x320 ... compared it to 800x480

Re: Best Handheld for playing back high res/bitrate videos?
 

Ooh lookie, the Anti-Apple radar is at work ;)

It was just a short list of Cortex A8 devices that I could remember off hand. A starting point for the poster to read up more about the main achilles heel he was complaining about: "N800 and other handhelds can't handle high resolution videos".

Re: Best Handheld for playing back high res/bitrate videos?
 

Well, does any of them actually implement or have software to handle high resolution video?

I have looked at iPhone 3GS a lot, but it just doesn't have hi-resolution video playback capability. Also as Architengi mentioned, its only 480x320 resolution lcd, worse than the N800...

Nokia RX-51 - haven't heard of any specific mention to ability to playback high resolution video either. I some how doubt hi-res video playback will be supported anytime soon on it.

Note sure about the others though.

Re: Best Handheld for playing back high res/bitrate videos?
 

http://www.gsmarena.com/iphone_3gs_p...-news-1080.php

http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/20/i...ideo-playback/

Re: Best Handheld for playing back high res/bitrate videos?
 

The N800 is not a PMP, granted, but 640x480 is mostly doable with some tweaking (44.1kHz audio and mplayer with high bitrate configs, bitrate depending on codec).

If you want flawless HD playback, you need a 'real' PMP for that, and even there you won't find all that many devices that do resolutions like 1080p (the closest to what you say is the Archos 5, with a 800x480 screen, but even with special DSP codecs it does only 720p).

That is misleading. AFAIK They made a custom codec that transcodes 1080p streams into iPhone-ish resolution (which is less than half the pixel count of a N800).

Re: Best Handheld for playing back high res/bitrate videos?
 

@attila: very interesting. I read somewhere that high-def movies from itunes store come in multiple resolution for the different target device (desktop & apple tv + handheld version), and you're right, this could be making use of that feature of the stream is indeed embedded in the same file.

But 'transcode' may not be the proper term.. just multiple streams with different resolution & bitrate in a single container.

Other than Archos (which I heard is a licensing nightmare, having to buy codec plugins and all that), you can check out the Creative Zii too...

Re: Best Handheld for playing back high res/bitrate videos?
 

No, the stream is a regular video stream. The point is that the codec 'knows' it needs to output a low, fixed resolution image. In other words, it can cheat as you won't see the difference anyway. With 1080p trailers you need to divide by 4 to get iPhone resolution, in effect meaning that the gain is in not decoding whole 8x8 blocks, but probably coming up with a (DSP accelerated way) of getting a 2x2 block from the original (or maybe just a single pixel and little extra info to help interpolation).

Re: Best Handheld for playing back high res/bitrate videos?
 

Well, Samsung claims to be able to do 720p video in this diagram:

http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/...samsungsoc.jpg