Nokia's website shows that the n810 has h.264 and mp4 video playback capabilities. Is the n810 fast enough watching videos (say, transcoded from tivo to an ipod friendly format, for example)? Or is it choppy?

I am torn between a few different devices, but keep coming back to the n810.

Thanks,

-jamie

I was watching 320 x 240 15fps streaming video over my EVDO verizon cellular link ..It was a bit hiccup like but most of the time it just streamed fine. I even had other programs like the web browers open and xchat
CJ

Oh Yeah Mpeg4 i believe.

Note that I am asking about the playback aspect, from a show stored on a microSD card, not just streaming.

I'm trying to watch some Google Techtalks in mp4 from Google Video (downloads for Video IPod/Sony PSP) on N800 with OS2008 Beta with default Media Player. It kinda works, but audio/video comes out of sync and video becomes choppy after a short time, and some of these videos fail to start playing from the beginning - you need to move time slider to skip first few minutes. Overall, pretty disappointing. Maybe OS2008 and/or MPlayer will do a better job.

^ what's the resolution and compression for those clips?

Mine are encoded at 320x176, or 320x240 for tv shows (basically using ipod settings), usually < 900k

(839.88 kbits/s)

I have a couple of movies which seem to be mostly around here:
Apple MPEG4 Decompressor, 640 x 272, Millions
AAC, Stereo (L R), 48.000 kHz
1012.50 kbits/s

Which, on the ipod, plays fine.

Thanks...

If MPEG4 is choking, I can just imagine what an h.264 encode will do. As someone who does encoding for a living, I don't mind converting video files to a formate that the 810 likes. Has anyone been able to get any video file to play with a resolution of 640X480 at 29.97 fps with smooth playback? What flavor of video does the 810 like the most?

Yes I know most of you on here don't really care about video as you have bigger fish to fry with this device. I just still can't help trying to justify my purchase of an 810.

Well, yes, video on the n800 is quite disappointing (considering that on a psp I can play with no issues h264 encoded videos at 480x272).

jamiepda: This has been covered a couple times before on this forum, which is why you aren't seeing many people chime in. I'll try and answer this in hopes that people searching in the future find this post.
Executive summary: The bandwidth between the CPU and LCD controller on the N800 is the absolute limiting factor of what's theoretically possible. IIRC, 640x480@24fps would be close to the theoretical limit of that bandwidth. (See here for more info.) the N810 is almost exactly the same hardware, with the only real internal changes being some more flash memory, miniSD vs 2x SD, and a GPS, so it shares the same limitation.
Now onto, the good news: The LCD controller can do pixel "doubling" with no performance impact (arbitrary scaling, really). If you're going to transcode anyways, xvid/divx video with mp3 audio works great. 400x240 @ 800Kb/s or so is bulletproof. It looks great on the screen and plays flawlessly even with lots of fast motion. The builtin media player is decent and mplayer is available as well thanks to the excellent work of a forum member named Serge. Mplayer supports a couple of formats the builtin player doesn't and vice versa. AFAICT, one of the big things that might affect playback is actually the audio encoding. MP3 decoding usually happens on the DSP on the N800. Even if it's done in user space there are more than one fixed-point, ARM optimized mp3 codecs available. The situation for other codecs varies but I could definitely see AAC decoding taking siginificantly more CPU power. Anyways, that's someplace to start at least. Hopefully I don't have anything too horribly wrong in there. I'm sure someone will correct me if I do.

-John