some people claim that theres no reason to play 720p video on the N900 because the screen is only 800x480.
that claim is flawed for the following reasons:

1.) 800x480 xvid/h264 is actually not pixel perfect! there are alot of COMPRESSION artefacts and quality loss.
this quality loss can be minimized by playing downscaled 720p video instead!

2.) 720p support means that these videos dont need to be converted before being used for playback - which saves time.


however most people will not want to use 720p for general use, since the N900's storage capacity is limited to 32GB (+32GB mSDHC)... also, such a small screen wont justify HD-video playback for most people.
but using the N900 as a media center with TV-OUT can be one of the real usage situations for 720p support (even if its downscaled to 800x480)



im currently looking into learning DSP C++ / Assembler coding, as i want to port/code 720p video-recording codecs for the camera.
perhaps making a codec from scratch that will be as DSP friendly as possible to cram out 60fps in 480p, and 25fps in 720p.

im still in the initial stage of learning it, and its quite overwhelming so i guess the N900 will be long dead when ive gained enough experience to undertake the task.

PS. one likely reason that playback/recording of videos on the N900 "drops frames", is that Maemo is somewhat too heavyweight (perhaps its a issue with virtual memory activity)... if this is the case i would like to make a dual boot option with a stripped down version of maemo, that will only run essential tasks for video/sound playback/recording.