The latest firmware shines in video playback.

"Shines" is a bit too strong a word, IMHO.

The built-in video player gets awfully confused when you switch from fullscreen to windowed playback, which is essential when you want to fast forward through some commercials or something.

It carries on trying to play it and, more often than not, hangs. It'd be better off pausing the video for a second.

Still, at least it doesn't pause in the middle: it's a step up, at least.

I use DVD Ripper for Mac. Select Creative Zen, and set zoom to medium. I've put a couple DVDs successfully onto n800 with this. More experimentation needed though.

My video converted with Media Converter OS X Universal allowed the vid to play for a couple of minutes but then started playing 2x or 3x speed. I instead used ffmpegX to convert the same video and used the built-in AVI DIVX mencoder profile. I only changed the resolution to 400 x 224 on the video tab and it worked like a champ during play back for the first ten minutes or so then went into the fast forward thing again. This file is less than 200 MB.

I have two movies over 1 hr each. The first one would go to slow motion after 1 hr mark and it seems the N800 halts. The second movie does not have the same symptom though. The two movies were converted by Nokia video converter from avi to mp4.

Strange !!!

If you can reproduce this, can you file a bug please against the Video Converter at https://bugs.maemo.org? Please put into the bug reportif this problem happens every time you play the movie at the same spot in the movie? Also, what happens if you play back the mp4 on your Windows machine? Does it play ok then?