Notices

I'll just give you the converted video details.

Resolution 640 x 480
Bitrate 900
Audio 128 aac
Video file .mp4 or .avi (same stutter)
Filesize tried full length or cropped a clip to reduce size (same result)

When you do an advanced reply (not the quick post one) you can insert an attachment to the post

I can't help but think that there may be something eating up your cpu while you're trying to run the video. Are you sure the idle cpu usage is at a good place? There are good tools in the repos to monitor that sort of thing.

Thanks for the effort. I really appreciate it. Last thing, what app can you recommend for me to monitor my CPU usage? I currently have cpu appmem (i dont know what's the exact name) to view the CPU and Mem load. I made sure that it's running the minimum load before I launch the media player and that there are no other tasks running.

Let's debug this bit by bit. I am using system info widget to track cpu usage.

1) When idling on my desktop my cpu usage is between 1 and 3% mostly around 1%

2) after media player settles and I've selected the videos section the cpu usage is also between 1 and 3%

3) When pausing a video also the cpu usage is between 1-3%

Are your levels that low?

When server is up you can check encoding settings here:
http://wiki.maemo.org/N900_Video_Encoding

You should give mplayer/kmplayer a try. Plays a lot of video formats that the standard player won't (even with extra codecs enabled).

I use it to watch movies recorded from TV. No need to re-encode or overclock.

When idle my CPU is at 7% to 9%. Perhaps its the widgets running? I have 2 active desktops. Widgets are Calendar Home Widget, Email, Media player and conversations. The rest are shortcuts. BTW, I already tried closing all widgets running then play a video. It ended up with the little stutters.

I just tried closing all widgets. CPU usage ranges from 8% to 11%. I wonder what is running in the background.

Try using top or htop to determine which app is eating at ur cpu.