The N900 xvideo output driver won't play files with a resolution greater than 854x480. This is not a hardware limitation, but a missing feature, specifically either the N900 firmware doesn't implement the videoscale GStreamer plugin, video scaling is not implemented in the OpenMax IL layer in the DSP video codec or this functionality is implemented and is just not exposed in the xvideo driver.

You can always use mplayer to downscale your video but since it's not hardware accelerated it's going to be slow. Example :

mplayer -sws 0 -vf scale=800:-2 video.file

jdb2