That I can't speculate on, but I can't imagine they'd go over about ~1024x612, as the OMAP3430 is limited to 1024x768.

Certainly hardware wont be the barrier to 3d acceleration, anyway, but there could still be driver issues if Nokia doesn't pony up.

I downloaded some small-sized TV episodes the other day. They are 608x352 resolution, but only 24 fps with a bitrate of 250kbps. They look a bit too compressed for me to watch on my big screen TV, but I found they play really nicely on my N800 using MPlayer.

I can't imagine trying to watch video on anything but MPlayer.

I've watched a lot of video on my tablet, and I've found that increased resolution is theoretically better, but in practice I can't see the improvement. I guess the pixels are just too dense on the screen or something. I notice compression artifacts a lot more. So in the end, I'd rather watch a 400x240 or 320x240 video at 550 to 800kbps than a higher resolution video with higher compression.

I've found that it is quite straightforward to run a one-pass XviD transcode using VirtualDub, using lanczos3 resize to something-by-240. I find that I can often optimize the video for the IT's screen at this point, too, by sacrificing a bit of the horizontal resolution to get the aspect ratio closer to the IT's 15:9 ratio.

I must say, I was completely mystified when I installed OS2008 and I discovered that the new media player still couldn't play my bog-standard 320x240 AVI files.

Can someone post a HOWTO for making the tablet (File Manager, etc) open video files in MPlayer by default?

EDIT: I figure at the rate that I'm banging up my N800, it will probably conk out just in time for the N900 or whatever. My only sadness is that it probably won't have full-size SD slots... just as the price of SD cards is hitting rock bottom.

well duh! hi resolutions on a 4.1'' screen is ******ed, but see im saying this bcuz the movies u download off torrent sites (legally) are all around dvd-res or similar (such as 624x352).

converting vids takes ssoooo long and i wish i could bypass that step.

iirc n8** already has 3d, the chip has implementation of PowerVR, but no proper drivers in kernel

Maybe for a stupid PMP, but being able to browse most websites without having to scroll horizontally is what really makes the NITs. If it were actually ******ed, why do you think all the new competition is using 800x480 or better?

Yes, as I said, the OMAP2420 SoC does have a PowerVR (and a hardware video decoder), but since we're not using the built-in LCD controller, there are some hardware issues involved beyond just not having drivers. I believe Nokia has chosen not to release/port drivers because of the poor performance we will get out of 3d acceleration with a 3rd-party LCD controller. I don't particularly agree with this decision (any acceleration is better than none), but I can certainly imagine why they'd choose to go this route.

I'm finding I have to feed the N800 the same videos I transcode for my TH55 to get them to play smoothly, and considering the TH55 has a 123MHz CPU vs the N800's 400MHz+DSP, this doesn't seem *right* somehow!

My Zodiac2 has been consistently better than the N800 by a significant amount for video playback, MPEG4 derivatives at least, 'tho the Zod2 is known for having a very good MPEG4 decoder.
Is the N800 DSP even used for decoding??

As I stated more than one above, it's due to the low-bandwidth to the 3rd-party LCD controller.

For audio, yes, but the video decoding, no, due to the same reason I outlined above.

it is not that bad. The interface is not serial (i.e. 1 bit) and should be able to pump 640x480 at 25fps in 12bit YUV mode, see
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/list...rs/22014#22014
Bitrate matters only for decoding (=CPU time) and is not relevant to 'slow' RFBI interface. If I understand it correctly the limitation is that mplayer does not decode frames in advance so everything is time critical and decoding of each frame must wait until previous frame is displayed (i.e. sent to epson chip over rfbi). That's because it is done directly to internal video ram[1] (the only place from which it can be sent via DMA (= no overhead) to epson chip over RFBI) . If we had one extra frame in internal video buffer, decoding frame and displaying frame could be decoupled with no waits. If we even had more frames we could smooth out short more CPU intensive (high motion) scenes.

1. internal video ram is for 770 in normal RAM (64MB SDRAM), for N800 there is one 800x480 plane in SDRAM and one 640x480 plane in internal OMAP2 SRAM, this one is usable via Xv extension as video overlay.

EDIT: maybe mplayer does decode frame in advance to some off-screen memory but then it still must wait for display update to finish so it can do the final copy to video memory (possibly with conversion to specific videochip framebuffer format) without overwriting previous (still not fully transferred) frame. Maybe Serge will correct me if he cares to explain it one more time :-)

sorry for offtopic:
@Cyker:
which device you like more: the zodiac2 or the internet tablet.
my zodiac2 was stolen so i´m in need for a new device. currently i´m in love with the n810. what do you recommend more?
i would like the device for:
surfing via wlan at home...(zodiac doesn´t have wlan)
watch videos
No music!
use pim (kde...)
play little games...(battle for wesnoth)
so please help me a little bit...
thanks.
if you wanna have some zodiac stuff, email me!
zehjotkah[at]googlemail[dot]com

I don't even know what that means...!

Ah bummer man... I'd be pissed if my Z2 got stolen

I don't think the Zod would be able to do most of that stuff (I *know* you wouldn't be able to run something as bloated as KDE on it... and I doubt there is a Wesnoth port...!)

In a head to head comparison 'tho, I find the Zod is better at 'informative' web browsing than the N800 (I'm a bit lucky there because I managed to snag the last Universe browser beta, and a Sandisk WiFi+256MB SDIO card!! \o/)
The N800 does generally well because of its wider screen, but it's so f'ing slow, while Universe is a lot quicker, even over the slow-*** SDIO 11b WiFi, but chops out any Flash and larger images.

Of course, because it does that, there will be a good few mainstream sites it can't browse, so the N800 has an advantage there.

With Videos, the Zod2 also does a *much* better job than the N800 if you're using TCPMP and watching MPEG4 (i.e. MP4 (Not H.264!), DivX and XviD vids), because of the ATI hardware chip. For other stuff it struggles a bit, and also the 2GB SD limits the amount of stuff you can watch anyway.

At the moment, I like my Zod2 better than the N800.
Tapwave were a bit Zen-of-Palm when they made it, and there a lots of little niceities that show they paid attention to detail.
The N800 is typical Linux - i.e. it's a f'ing PITA to get anything done in it because you have to jump through so many hoops. I'm a sucker for that sort of thing 'tho

The area the N800 has my Zod2 soundly thrashed is the games department. ScummVM and OpenTTD are leaps and bounds ahead of the Zod versions ('tho one advantage the Zod has is that you can TYPE IN SAVE FILENAMES! ), and I imagine a lot of suitable opensource games will make their way to the NIT's.


You'd probably be better off with the N810 at this stage 'tho - It is more capable than the Zod2 bar a few things, and most of the things I dislike about it will probably fixed or hacked around in the future. This is all a bit moot 'tho, as I doubt you'll have much luck finding a Zodiac these days unless Olympic Systems is still selling the 'Tank Edition' Zodiac2s they had...!

HTH!