Hi, I'm new here and have an N900. I've been messing around with encoding to find something that works and doesn't need lots of re-encodes and is pretty simple to use.

Encoders: Handbrake 0.9.3 (Xvid) and 0.9.4 (H.264) on Windows 7 64bit.

Players tried: Media Player (GUI), mplayer (CLI)

Video 1: MKV container, H264 Video @ 720x592 25fps. 2 Audio tracks (AAC, AC3), 2 Subtitle tracks.
- this is the standard Handbrake 0.9.4 setting, the movie's original audio was stereo
- checked using mplayer and SiB (frontend)
- Audio: it plays audio perfectly (both the 128kbit AAC track and the 192kbit AC3 track, using -aid to pick)
- Video: it detects H264 and plays using ffmpeg fine as well and rescales to the correct aspect ratio; however, it plays at ~ 20fps, and so loses sync to the audio within a short while
- Subtitles: it plays these perfectly, in sync absolutely with the audio, using -sid to pick

There is obviously some trick to this It is so close, so I think it's easily possible in some way to optimise the encoder to not slow down the video so much.
- framedrop: results in blank video output
- lavdopts: kept crashing on launch, I was just playing around here, but I don't think it's an mplayer issue really!
- scale: I can't find out how to put in [ or ] brackets so haven't been able to try this.
Video 2: AVI container, Xvid video at 720x592, Audio MP3 (downmixed from AC3 5.1 on DVD), subtitles encoded using standard Handbrake tickbox.
- using standard Handbrake 0.9.3 settings (including Anamoprhic on ! - this was testing)
- plays perfectly, except of course it is playign in 4:3 mode and there is no aspect adjustment possible, so you get your widescreen movie squashed up.
- re-encoded no anamorphic adjustment: perfect aspect ratio, full screen.

Obviously it would be great to be able to keep standard MKVs with all tracks available. The solution in the short term would be keeping Xvid as the video codec, but having all options for audio incl. 5.1 and subs in the MKV file. mplayer seems to have no trouble picking up the available options, but SiB is pretty basic as a frontend and doesn't have options for picking specific tracks in the MKV, so CLI is the only option so far.

Ideally:
1. Continue to play with H264 settings and find the sweet spot to get video framerates resolved.
2. A nice frontend for mplayer to replace the built in one on the N900.