Correction, the n900 will stream video (through the built in media player, mplayer or pretty much anything *but* Flash) just fine.

It is Adobe Flash that will not render video, because it's bloated and un-optimized. Adobe/Macromedia has put a lot of time polishing this turd for Windows/X86 machines, but it tends to suck even worse on other platforms (desktop mac and linux included).

The n900 is just the latest in a long line of machines that can stream video fine, but choke playing a video through the bloated Adobe Flash plugin.

As others have noted on this thread, the Adobe Flash Plugin, being proprietary, is not fixable by the community in anyway.

All you can do is hope that the powers that be at Adobe see fit to grace our platform with performance optimizations (like the promised hardware acceleration coming in 10). Consider yourself 'lucky' that the Flash plugin is available at all.

Now all that said, the flash plugin on the n900 is one of the best implementations of flash I've seen on a non-windows platform. But as you may be able to tell from the tone of this post, that doesn't say a whole lot.