Have some shaky video playback. Converting Straight avi files to mp4 doesn't seem to help much. Best luck seems to come from the mplayer with avi files in original format.. Decent but not perfect playback. Any new applications in the future out there? Newbie thx in advance. PS. Luv the n800

Try launching mplayer from a terminal with these options: "mplayer -lavdopts lowres=1,400 /media/mmc1/some_video.avi".

That'll make mplayer decode videos >400px wide at half resolution. If it works well you can make it the default by editing mplayer's config file.

See my sig for a link to the Nokia Video Converter project

check out this thread for information on Markz's video converter. It works well and has more options than the nokia converter.

More options aren't necessarily good though. Realistically, if you always use one or two combinations of width, height, bitrate - why bother with having them freely variable every time?

Presets are the way to go (I even use a super-high quality preset in tablet-encode for doing transcoding not intended for my tablet, now).

True -- the Nokia app is designed for simple, non-tweaking use. On the other hand, it also uses different codecs than the Open Source tools so that might be worth checking out depending on what you're trying to accomplish.