Notices

I'm having problems playing a video on mPlayer that works fine on the built in Media Player. The video (a sienfeld episode) was originally created for my video ipod.

I downloaded MediaBox (a python 'wrapper' to mPlayer) today. A beautiful looking app, but that's what showed me that mPlayer (which I wasn't using) didn't work.

Any suggestions? From what I've been reading around, supposedly mPlayer is better than built in player for virtually any media. Doesn't seem to be true in this case.

Troubleshooting note: The Nokia 'demo' video plays beautifully in both pieces of software.

Thanks in advance.

http://mplayer.garage.maemo.org/

Two parts are important:
"MPlayer currently provides the best quality of mpeg4/divx/xvid video playback for Nokia 770 / N800"
and
"Some file formats and codecs are not supported or poorly supported, mostly proprietary formats like real media or WMA/WMV"

Unfortunately H.264 and AAC fall into the poorly supported codecs category at the moment because they don't have any special ARM optimizations right now and just use a slow generic code. Adding optimizations for these codecs is possible, but they require a good share of work and time.

OS2008 is the first firmware revision to support H.264, it will need some time for mplayer to accommodate to video priorities change and catch up.

Serge:

You rock! Thank you for the lucid and logical answer. I am looking forward to getting it working, as the MediaBox front end is a nice piece of work.

I am a long time programmer, and hope to contribute to the Maemo/NIT community, but unfortunately my love of 'low level programming' (ie: device drivers, assembly language) is 25 years gone. That being said, if someone needs a Qume Daisy Wheel driver for a WordStar Maemo port, I'm the guy :-)