I have surprisingly good experience with Mplayer on the N800. In my Linux workstations, it seems as though the standard Mplayer will not show almost all movies unless I install the extra codecs packages. On the N800 with OS2008, it appears to me that Mplayer shows almost all movies I try, even though it has none of the extra codecs installed. Why does it work? (Guesses: Am I just finding a lucky random sample of movies to watch on the N800? Does the Mplayer package for N800 include codecs that are not on the desktop version?)

Oh, I have a related question. I had some movies that Mplayer could not show on a Linux PC with Mplayer. They were huge files, too big to put on the N800. Then I installed the Media Converter (https://garage.maemo.org/projects/mediaconverter/) program on the desktop PC to translate the movies into smaller files that could show on the N800. That process was pretty painless--if you did not try it yet, you should.

But then I wondered, "if a file requires some strange codec that Mplayer is lacking, how is Media Converter able to open and convert the video file?" Know what I mean? It appears Media Converter can grab any kind of movie. Why does that work?

PJ