One thing I don't understand is the poor video performace of the third party video player. Video actually streams very well over the internet using the built in player, but video playing playing direct from an sd card using the third-party app is unusably choppy. Any explanation for this. I would have thought it would be the reverse.

What 3rd party app are you talking about?


Luke

Mplayer is the 3rd pty app

Now that you mentioned MPlayer as this third-party app think about the following reasons:
1. Nokia had a lot more time to develop software for N800 (including the built-in player) than third-party developers
2. Nokia developers work full time while I have some other job and my free time is very limited
3. Nokia has control over all the software components and can tweak any of them until they work fine together and pass QA while I have to deal with unexpected incompatibility issues with Xv and gstreamer. I'm not implying that all the bugs are in N800 Xv and gstreamer implementation, but some issues are very strange and what worked on Nokia 770 and desktop PCs fails on N800 now.
4. N800 release date was unexpected event for most people, the same applies to the last firmware update. We had no chances to do any preliminary tests to ensure compatibility (releasing a beta version of firmware for developers early for would help) and anybody who relies on low level stuff and features changed between OS2007 revisions would lag behind official Nokia releases as a result. This all is also quite a bit discouraging and is killing motivation somewhat.
5. MPlayer was never announced to work perfectly on N800 yet, we are just at the very beginning again. Also you did not mention that you are interested in video performance on N800. If you had Nokia 770 and compared MPlayer performance with the built-in player there, you would not ask this question in the first place. And if you find and check MPlayer thread here in this forum, you will find out that it took months and quite a lot of revisions and improvements before MPlayer became order of magnitude better in terms of preformance than the default player on Nokia 770.

Are these reasons enough for you? So either help to improve MPlayer (read my signature) or just wait.

I've had excellent performance from mplayer. Thanks for all the work. I've been able to play 576x320 DIVX files perfectly, which will not play on the default media player.

The three videos I played were all very choppy. What can I say. I will try some others. I am happy to contribute to your development effort and look forward to future enhancements. I purchase a lot of retail and shareware software for pocket pc's, smartphones, and windows pc's and support numerous efforts.

I fInd the webpad very frustrating. WhIle this is obviously heresy here, I find myself wishing the 800 would run WM Crossbow instead of Linux. I have owned a 770 and now this 800, and it requires a significant investment of time (that I can not afford).

Hi Mark,

Serge's Mplayer port (see his thread) seems to work well for me. Did you do any re-encoding of your videos specifically for the N800 or did you copy the desktop "version" of the movie and tried to play it on Mplayer? Naturally, Mplayer's goal is to minimise the need for re-encoding, but if you have some re-encoded videos that play well in the Nokia's media player, it usually plays well in Mplayer as well.

Maybe you can give us more specifics on the media file you tried?


Luke