Video playback tearing
 

I can't be the first person to be annoyed by this.

It is basically the same with all media players: the built-in player, mplayer, and canola. I've tried all useful video output options on mplayer, but the problem remains. I know of no option that will synchronize the output with the vertical refresh.
Is there any hope that this will be fixed, either with the 770 or in the 870?

That's interesting. I did not know that LCD displays still have refresh rate in the same sense as CRTs. So I still do not get how it works. My understanding was that LCD controller has its own video memory, its data gets updated when we want to pull something into it from a framebuffer using some omapfb ioctls. Where does this 55Hz number come from? Does LCD controller constantly refresh image on the screen internally and this tearing effect is caused by screen update request coming in the middle of this internal screen refresh phase?

I'm not familiar with LCD technology, so I'm asking these stupid questions, some references to useful information would be very much appreciated.

Yes, exactly. Kernel ioctl sends data to memory buffer inside Epson controller and the same memory is periodically sent to LCD display.
Last time it was discussed it looked like there are some registers which might allow to synchronize this ioctl somehow with the internal refresh but the information is not public so only Nokia guys can do it.

I am not sure about generic info on the net but the Epson chip overview is here http://www.erd.epson.com/index.php?o...d=36&Itemid=40
You can also guess how it works from OMAP LCD controller (which is not used in N770) docs - google for spru675.pdf

Thanks for the information, by the way, I tried to add information about LCD chip and a link to this overview information to hardware specs maemo wiki page, but any editing does not seem to have any effect, that's strange.

It would be too great if nokia would do something at this point!!!
Tearing in videos is so annoying.

Does an official "feature request" page exist where we could add something like that?

Most likely the best place to report bugs and feature requests is supposed to be here: https://maemo.org/bugzilla/