Just regarding the HD playback on the phone.

1. Youtube sucks even in HQ - am I doing something wrong? Amendment in settings?

2. Noticed it will not play any avi. file formats - again - my mistake or do they need converting first?

3. I have a 720p HD film in MP4 format - however it will not play on my phone. I just get the broken video icon on screen when I attempt to start it. I noticed the Source Code trailer already on the phone is in the MP4 format so unsure what I have done wrong

1- Well, HQ will only be so good on a 640x360 screen. There might be something else going on though.

2 and 3- often depends what codec is used to create the video in either container. The videos may have been encoded with a codec that the N8 can't decode. I can't remember off the top of my head which ones it can do so I'd check the manual and check your files.

I understand that the N8 will not play HD movies over 2gb - is that correct?

Problem is I have a HD movie which is in an MP4 format but will not play on my N8 (broken icon appears) this file is currently 490mb

So I attempted it to convert it to an MKV format but the output folder shows that the file would increase from 490mb to over 7gb!!

What the hell?? All I want to do is play a HD movie from my phone to my TV.

I keep reading that the N8 plays a wide aray of video formats - but it would not play my HD movies in avi format or MP4. Any converters out there to keep the size down? Do I have to split them - how would I do this? Would it mean the movie stopping every half hour or so and me selecting the new file to reload?

It probably only plays h264 baseline profile, most content in the wild is high profile.