Samsung I8910 Omnia HD which was released 6 months before the N900 with identical OMAP3430 platform with A8 cpu at 600Mhz can record and playback 720P (1280x720 resolution) videos. It can even play 720P xvid/divx codec avi videos with no frame drops.

So why can't the N900 do this with the same hardware? (Heck, now that N900 can be overclocked to 1Ghz, it's faster than nearly ALL the mobile phones out in the market right now.)

It's not a matter of it's too slow or dropping frame rates but it won't even attempt to play the file at all. It's as if there is some form of resolution limit which is imposed on both default media player and mplayer and just exits out when it's too high. So it doesn't even try playing the file.

Does anyone know if there is some kind of soft limit?