Notices

N800 has better screen, faster processor, more memory, two SD slots, better pen (believe me, it matters), stereo speakers.

770 is slightly smaller.

I'd go for N800.

I tried to install this from maemo's catalogue but application manager won't let me install it. how do i get this to work?

Install directly from debian in here:
https://garage.maemo.org/frs/downloa...mo.9_armel.deb

This seems seriously unstable on my n800... The playback is not fluid, and it hangs and doesn't let me quit the application very easily... Ironically, the in-built app seems much more stable. Am I doing something wrong?

Saccente - probably not, I've had the same behaviour with previous mplayers on N800 (build 7 if I recall - build 8 was better). I don't believe the author (Serge) has a N800 yet and some of the builds will not be fully optimised or tested on N800 until he can get hold of one - Serge lives in a country not supported by Nokia.

I have been playing with this on my N800 recently and have noticed some issues. With the default settings and in high motion scenes I see some skipping back and forth a couple frames at a time. As if someone in the scene was putting their foot forward then back again, then they keep walking.

I tried with -ao esd -ac ffmp3, and while a lot more frames get dropped, the skipping back and forth isnt there anymore which i think is more bearable.

Right now the problems with video support on n800 are related to video output drivers.

Nokia 770 has the following options for video output (-vo option):
* sdl (no hardware YUV colorspace support and slow software scaler)
* nokia770 (hardware YUV support using framebuffer direct access and optimized scaler, right now it is default option)

Nokia N800 has the following options for video output (-vo option):
* sdl (no hardware YUV colorspace support and slow software scaler)
* xv (theoretically the best video output method, it is hardware accelerated and provided by xserver bundled in n800 firmware)

Now the bad news. Looks like video output in n800 using xv is rather buggy both in built-in player (see some reports here) and in mplayer. Video output using 'nokia770' driver does not work on n800 yet. First, screen update ioctl seems to ignore YUV color format flag and works with RGB (green colored garbage), pixel doubling is not supported anymore, also JIT scaler crashes on n800 (apparently some problems with cache coherency for dynamically generated code). The only more or less reliable video output method for n800 currently is sdl, but it is very slow.

BTW, there is no surprise that built-in player is a bit more stable, at least I'm sure that testing and quality assurance in n800 firmware was done for it, but not for mplayer

So what can we do right now? In the long run we can expect some bugfixes for libxv in future n800 firmware updates. Another alternative is to experiment with framebuffer ioctls and update 'nokia770' video output code to work with n800 (xserver sources provide some insights about how it should work, I'm checking this code now). With some luck, we may expect a n800 ready build of mplayer soon (if a bug is only in xserver but not in kernel framebuffer driver, otherwise a fixed firmware will be still required).

Well, I already got my n800 on last Sunday, but did not have enough free time to do anything with it till this weekend

Here is some N800 progress report.

Now I have some test version of framebuffer based video output for N800 working. It is not ready for public release yet as I still need to clean up the sources a bit and test it more (make sure that nothing got broken for Nokia 770 while hacking the code). This video output code is not very fast (looks like framebuffer driver got a bit more complicated and YUV screen updates are currently slower than RGB) but video playback does not jam anymore.

Anyway, direct framebuffer access on N800 may serve only as a temporary solution, once libxv gets fixed, it would be the preferred way for video output. In addition, we can't be sure that framebuffer API would not change in the next firmware update breaking mplayer. But we can keep xv video output as default and have an option for enabling this framebuffer based video output hack for those who would like to watch video here and now

What do you think, is it worth trying?

Do you need testers?

Having the xv option as default is probably best, assuming we get a fix from nokia
sometime soon. But it would be great if there was an easy to use gui switch to activate the temporary work around you came up with. I am so very excited to use my n800 as a multimedia device soon. Thanks again for your hard work Serge.

Edit: lol hard to tap this out without a keyboard