Notices

I have both KMplayer and SiB player installed..

all jerky xvid videos play fine for me in SiB (compared to the built in player and KMplayer, which do not run some avi/xvid files very smoothly)

If I'm not mistaken SiB uses only mplayer as it's backend while Kmplayer has it an one of it's options. Maybe your Kmplayer isn't set to use mplayer? HTH

The stuttering videoplayback is gone, I fixed this by using this program
http://www.videohelp.com/tools/MPEG4_Modifier . And unpack the stream (takes about 20sec in total per video file). Thank you.

Thank you ... it is somehow fixed ,playback improved a lot ,but one questions is there a software that can do a batch of files rather than using MPEG4_Modifier for each file I want to add.
Thank you.

andkgvd nice solution, i took the other way, overclocked the N900 to 900Mhz and using SiB atm plays most content fine...

Still maybe some code optimization would be indeed the better way...

I agree with one of the earlier posts... anyway to unpack the bitstream on the N900 directly?

For instance if I'd used Transmission on the N900 to download an avi and didnt have access to a computer with MPEG Modifier?

can you expand on this?

what is sip? how does it relate to this problem?

thx

I am assuming you have to hit the save button and make sure it accepts the changes to the file in order for it to work?

Sip is a front-end for Mplayer, i.e. it is an alternative player. If you have Mplayer installed already, I'd install Sip as well, it's fairly small. It takes a different approach than KMplayer, both have their advantages.

I do not agree that it is a fix though, at best a workaround. But even then, Mplayer does not play everything well either, sometimes the image lags behind the sound.

So what would people say is the "optimum" combination of resolution, audio codec, video codec and container?

It seems to me that the limited support of b-frames in avi excludes it as candidate, and mkv is cited as "limited support", but it isn't clear what those limitations are.

I had been using
as suggested by EzInky, and playback is smooth, but every once in a while I get (in the middle of playing a vid) the "media unsupported" error, requiring a restart. So this is h264 baseline, ac3 and mkv, at 800x480.

I had attributed this error to mkv.

avi + xvid + mp3/ac3 hits issues with b-frames or packing - I realise we can unpack, but if I need to process the videos anyway, I may as well transcode to whatever is best.

Perhaps h264 baseline, ac3 and mp4 at 800x448 is best (for 16:9)?

And what about upscaling - if the content is already below the physical resolution of the n900, is it better to upscale beforehand or is the performance impact negligable enough to let the n900 do it?

I have tested a few varients, but every time the media player failed, I had to reboot so it was taking forever to transcode then test (I know now that I can restart by killing /usr/bin/mafw-dbus-wrapper mafw-gst-renderer, but if someone has already decided on an optimum then I don't need to go through it again).

http://wiki.maemo.org/Video_encoding