Notices

I've found that downloading iPhone versions of iPlayer content (using this method) then converting them from h.264 into XviD works amazingly on the tablet. 480x272, so not too bad, and I think the original video is something like 384kbps, so 500-600kbps in XviD does the trick. Mplayer really seems to struggle, which I find odd, but it's perfect with the default media player. Of course, those of you outside the UK, are scuppered

For iPlayer content there is a much better tool get_iplayer which is a perl script based application so is equally usable on Windows, OS X, Linux, BSD etc. You can download programmes in a variety of quality settings from HD (usually available) through high quality flash to regular low quality streaming flash and the video is automatically transcoded to h264+aac....and no DRM of course. It also has full PVR functionality in conjunction with cron/your OS's scheduler, and all kinds of useful options (can obtain subtitles, thumbnails etc). I've found that the flashvhigh1 and flashvhigh2 settings are ideal for obtaining something that can be transcoded for MPlayer on the N810, giving a very good picture with no artefacts and decently small file size. I've found that the combination of tablet-encode and Mplayer or KMplayer is much more satsfactory than the default player and Nokia's own converter.

Lately I mostly just convert audio and that's about it. Seriously, if it's a divx/xvid with less than 640x350 and about 800kbps (which is about a 350MB episode of a show...) it will do quite well. If I copy from the desktop through QTE I usually recompress, but mostly just to cut copy time, when I download on the tablet, I just convert audio tracks and that's it.