I actually agree with you there. So many are 'it kinda works' category:
- Maps (you know why)
- Media Player (such weak features and options)
- Email (same here)
- Video recording (my N95 8GB was better)
- Phone app (super basic with twitchy rotation)

I'm glad there are so many good apps made by the community to ease the pain somewhat.
N900 is awesome But it could be sooo much better if Nokia really cared about it after its release.

Anyways. We know hardware can do 720p video record and playback.
But will we ever get the N900 to do it? Hmm. I think it's a bit tougher than overclocking.
I would love it to at least be able to play 720p videos...

What are the chances you'll ask this question in its appropriate thread, and not try to snatch or divert the current thread's subject?

I am, still running tests, but so far it's almost perfect. Especially since such a load on a multitasking phone is never camera-smooth.

If you would have read the whole thread you'd know it will not help. This is a storage/conflict issue. If it were a power issue, 640x480 would have worked fine. Also, 600 Mhz to almost 1200 would have helped. It doesn't.

Because N900 has issues with recording, and adding more strain would have broken recording.

I am 100 percent confident it can be done with N900. Needs to be done by Nokia, most likely. Might be a driver limitation.

Well, find a codec that can compress 720p in realtime..

Isn't /dev/video and various ioctl()s fairly standard? Surely the max IO of the internal flash is enough for a weak/no encoded userspace dump? You can root level nice -19 the job, nice +20 the others, perhaps even send a SIGSTOP to a few likely culprets like the thm indexer? I notice somebody tried ffmpeg, but what caused the resolution limitation?

Possibly. It's also possible that at the same bitrate, the jump from 400K to 900K video the loss is bigger by compression than by optics. Artifacts could be bad enough that we get a clearer image at 800x480.

Why this isn't configurable is beyond me. I'm thinking driver?

From attempting to play 720p files via mplayer and vlc:

VLC says:
"Video Acceleration Driver does not support the required resoution 1280x720 pixels.
The maximum supported resolution is 864x648. Video output acceleration will be disabled."

mplayer says:
"Source image dimensions are too high: 1280x720 (maximum is 864x648)
FATAL: Cannot initialize video driver"

To me, this sounds like a video driver limitation and may be related to the video recording also?
Is there a way to remove the maximum resolution limit for hardware gpu acceleration?

i see that there is some progress here, no ?

Those are both decoder issues. For a decoder to accelerate video it needs a known, supported profile. It does not necessarily exclude encoder's abilities. It's just very, very likely. Trying to stay positive. It's possible that, because the screen was 800x480 that the decoder was intentionally limited.

Software encoding is out of the question, so, either they let us have it or we're boned.

I've understood that the IVA2 component of the omap3 CPU is entirely undocumented, and that there are some third parties which have been supplied documentation on it, and have created an enhanced decoder capable of 720p decode, and is selling it at enormously high cost.

Uncompressed 720p requires about 40 megabytes per second. The flash certainly can't handle that, and I don't even know if the bus that the camera is connected to can handle that much