at first i didn't think i'd gained anything as i've an overclocked cpu and have a hack to allow mplayer to play larger resolution videos on n900, but mplayer choked / stuttered on the mkv testsuite in the first post, and gstreamer played them fine (with dsp@600).

the loss of video recording is a high price to pay, but is worth it for me, however it will be (very) nice when this is resolved..