NITVC's output is to MP4, not WMV. You might want to check that file again.

I have directly downloaded xvid small files from tekzillla which i think is a part of revision 3. They played wonderfully in mplayer. please please try it out.

I'm spending a lot of time trying to improve my new N810 experience and the community here is great. I'm not one to give up and I hope these efforts help other users. Got a few replies to hit here. Again, thanks for the feedback.

1. Regarding slowdown of OS, menus, etc. I downloaded both MH-Shot-Tool and one called Load-Applet. Any preferences between MST and LA? Both seem to work the same but LA runs in the taskbar and allows you to kill processes. I used both to screenshot my xterm's "top" results after 3 conditions:
a. Screenshot after turning the unit completely off then back on:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/08...hot-2008-1.png
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/08...reenshot01.png
b. Screenshot after running a video in both Media Player and Mplayer separately, then closing the apps:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/08...hot-2008-2.png
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/08...reenshot02.png
c. Screenshot after running the browser, surf Google and then clsoing the app:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/08...hot-2008-3.png
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/08...reenshot03.png

The loss of free memory even after all apps are closed is huge. What does this mean and how can I improve this or does the OS do this automatically? I'm also looking at one process 1135 called osso-media-server, I've seen this %mem get as high as 73%. Is this a concern?
Is there anything in these screenshots that would explain the slowdown? Are N810 users expected to soft reset often? It gets worse, see PS below.

2. Regarding MP4 video. ghoonk, you are correct. I saw WMP in windows and assumed Windows Media Player, so I did an experiment with the following links:
a. http://feeds.ziffdavis.com/~r/ziffda...eeks.109.i.mp4
b. http://feeds.ziffdavis.com/~r/ziffda...ygeeks.109.mp4
c. http://feeds.ziffdavis.com/~r/ziffda...ygeeks.109.wmv
File "a" is labeled as "iPod/PSP" and played just fine without conversion!
File "b" is labeled as "MPEG" and crashes MPlayer and N810 home page, had to reboot.
File "c" I converted in NITVC and it played great.
Why "a" and "b" are so different I'll never know. They are same file type and about the same file size. Anyway, it looks like MP4s designed for smaller players is the way to go if you don't want to convert. But not everyone has these downloads... read on.

3. Regarding XVID, WMV and MOV at Revision3.Com, I downloaded the small versions and here are the results:
XVID: Opened in MPlayer. Good video quality, but audio out of sync.
WMV: Opened in MPlayer. Good video quality, but audio out of sync.
MOV: Opened in Media Player: Fair video quality, but audio out of sync.
So one question that comes to mind: Is there a way to shift the audio on these players via some settings? I used to do this in TCPMP when playing MOV files.

PS: I thought I would run a final screenshot after doing the video tests. Keep in mind all apps are closed.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/08...reenshot04.png
This is just crazy. I even saw the free mem drop to 6000K at one point.
Any code guys out there that can confirm that this is normal?

The problem did not affect all units, but still, better safe than sorry.

top is really a bad tool to gauge these things with. Besides, what's wrong with using RAM that's available to it? Most of this stuff will be freed up as it's needed for more essential stuff.

Specifically, the last item on the top line: "63796K cached"
That means that 63 MB of RAM is being used to keep programs or data in memory so it doesn't have to load them; but any of that memory can be freed like <finger-snap /> when more memory is needed, since it's just a copy of something that lives somewhere on secondary storage.

As far as which screenshot tool, I've discovered that the load-applet one doesn't work on (scrambles) portrait mode. So I'm now using mh-shot-tool.

You may want to eliminate the metalayer-crawler process. You can see that it's taking up around 60 MB of RAM after running and closing mplayer. If you search the forum regarding the metalayer-crawler, you will find that it consumes lots of cpu cycles searching for media files and runs down your battery as well.

The dilemma is this one: checking for the problem is a very complex procedure which involves using the command line, but curing the problem is very very easy and just involves formatting with the GUI file manager. Given that choice, it's easier just to tell everyone to reformat.

Well, I didn't even check whether I got a badly formatted card, I just went ahead and reformatted the Int Mem card via File Manager right after receiving N810. I also disabled the VM before doing it.
If you think doing it again will help I'll need to find a way to backup my maps first.
How does a badly formatted card even affect the slow OS if its not getting close to filling up?

File systems are complex and don't necessarily fill from the bottom up as you might expect. Not knowing that the bit at the end isn't there, the OS sees no reason to wait till last to put some data there (if you'll pardon the anthropomorphism).