Tried all the above with poor results. The way to do it is to have the video at 800kbs (max) and a resolution of of 400 x ??? (max) then it works very well.

hmmm - will have a go and see how fast it goes to convert with autogk.
Would be a good thing to have the N810 as a movie viewer for sonny on the long trips.

btw - djashjones, what about audio ?

mp3. i tried AC3 but i got no sound.

MPlayer plays it but the N800 lacks the processing power and so it chokes. That, presumably, is why it is recommended to reduce the resolution and video bitrate.

For me a video bitrate of 500 is fine – and gives a smaller file size.

MPlayer plays AC3 sound

Well I figured out why it's having problems. Whatever my camera uses to capture audio is screwing up the converters.. I discovered it as I put the audio at 0 (aka no audio) and it converts just fine..now what to do. I've tried using VirtualDub to re-encode the .AVI but it's no good. I've been using a work around of going through a PSP converter to turn it into an .mp4 file which then encodes..but the audio cuts out halfway in the video in a regular media player. Probably because it's AC3, then if I use MPlayer it's videoplay back is choppy as hell.