Notices

That sounds annoying. You don't happen to have pr1.2 installed?

Anyways, if your server has static ip, you could disable discovery and add it as a sticky server. Or use the client from extras instead of devel.

Thanks for the answer ukki.
I don't have PR1.2 (I installed the Qt4.6.2 libraries a while ago for development, but restored them later).
There doesn't seem to be any Knots 2 in extras, only in extras-devel. My extras is set to:
http://repository.maemo.org/extras/
fremantle
free non-free

My server does have static IP, and a domain name that I own pointing to that IP which I use (should that matter...).

Where/how do I add it as a sticky server, or do you mean automatic connection?

Maybe I have to delete all knots settings in my n900, where are they stored? There's no .knots folder in home or MyDocs.
This is all so strange, because this used to work perfect for me. What could have happened?

EDIT: Nope. Tried even more stuff. Tried using the IP address to connect with instead of domain name. Tried disabling authentication completely (after first having it enabled the first time after install). None of these work either. Knots 2 completely freeze upon trying to log in on the N900 the second time after installation. I can even be connected and having the application running and in the menu use: "Automatic connect" and then enter the freezed state. Using chrome or firefox webbrowsers to log in works however. Haven't tried SSH authentication since I once tried that the first time I saw knots and had problems with it that time.
My favorite n900 app. is broke, man that's depressing.

Do you have 0.3.1-1 installed then? The one in extras is 0.2.8-5.

You can disable automatic discovery and add sticky servers with gconf, it's listed in wiki. You can remove all knots2 settings first by using gconf:

*sigh*

Dunno what happened. As mentioned things ran perfectly last night. This morning I was tired of the "Enhanched linux kernel for powerusers" version 28 giving me alot of "Internal errors" with widgets disappearing etc, so I wanted to go back to v27, and used the "experimental" deinstaller, since the app. manager said that that was the way to do it. Well, it bricked my n900, so I had to reflash.

I've spent some hours trying to get it back into the state I think I left it in before the bricking, and wanted to continue testing knots and h264. Now video seems to run at half speed, resulting in terrible audio/video sync.

Well, at first I went with v27 of the kernel, but I figured that maybe v28 did something that helped the fluid playback, so I reluctantly upgraded to v30. Same slow video and now I'm getting "Internal errors" again GRRR...

Anywho, I then did what I should've done somewhat sooner - try starting the stream locally on the PC and using xterm to feed the stream into gstreamer... Voila! perfect sync, and fluid playback. I figured maybe this is why it worked last night (I also started my first succesful h264 this way, and then afterwards via knots) reasoning that the xterm launch had initialized something that made the knots client work better - but alas - same result.

Ukki, did you release a new client version in the meantime?

No, I haven't done anything since releasing the gstreamer version. Did you test with q key to test it's using gstreamer? You may need to reselect the profile, it defaults to mplayer and will only change the mplayer once you change the profile. Use q key during playback to confirm it's using gstreamer. I will change that in the next version.

Heh... that did the trick! Dag nabbit, now I have to see if I can get rid of the ******ed kernel version without bricking it again..

Okay, been testing some more and I've concluded a couple of things.

With h264 I feel its starting too look a wee bit smeared below 800 kbits. This codec definately expresses low bitrates differently than mp2/4v which starts getting really pixelated quickly.

And I've found mp4a to sound incredibly poor compared to mp3 (i put acodec=mp3 but it shows up as mpga in vlc). Regardless, it sounds acceptable @ 112kbit while mp4a sounds like crap @ 128. Makes no sense, I know, maybe something isn't configured properly in vlc.

I've also noticed that theres some degree of chopiness in certain scenes, but I think I know when it happens. Its in very low bitrate scenes (almost static). Intense scenes with lots of action is totally smooth. The kernel has a pretty steep clock frequency curve based on cpu usage, and I reckon it decides to downclock from 900 mhz to something like 250 or 500 (with corresponding dsp frequencies), and this causes the occasional hiccups.

I'll try locking the frequencies at max while testing some more.

Bottom line - for now I'm totally impressed with a profile of mp3@112kbit and h264@800.

So streaming backed up bluray content via 3g on my 2mbit upload pipe is starting to look realistic.

Damn nice!

Thank you wildt, I'll try to get the gstreamer backend working completely and make it a default soon. Can you export the profile and attach it here so I can add that as a default 3G profile? How fast is your 3G btw?

Wanna work on perfect N900 profile for wlan too? I'd really appreciate it.

"Perfect" profiles are gonna be really time consuming to find - but if you're watching on the device I really can't fault anything on how x264 looks @ 1024kbit. And I've been really nitpicking and holding the device close enough to make the wife ask if I finally needed glasses.

Also, I really don't know enough about the sub-parameters for x264 to know if I'm way off base, or close to the optimal settings really.

Audio in mp3 is anybodys business these days - some can't tell 128kbit from cd's and some audiophiles would die in horror. If I'm watching it in stereo with headphones I'm content with 128 vbr.

Something else - which we've already touched - is that it has to be mentioned somewhere (wiki) how easily x264 can make the server the bottleneck. For testing purposes I used the gaming rig which is a quadcore from intel @ 3.7ghz with a nVidia gfx card, which helps in the h264 decoding (from the bluray backups) and STILL it hovers around 30- 60% cpu utilization, and thats on all 4 cores.

ukki, thanks for your patience with helping. Clearing out the knots settings and then adding the server as sticky helped me.
Now I'm back to my good old self, harmony in life restored.