Are there any programs that can do it?
i got Transmission, and its very cool. Most movies on torrent sites are in 624x352 or something similar, and usually in DiVX Avi's. so if there was a program that could play it back smoothly, then thatd be awesome cuz ANYWEHRE I GO i could dload a movie (legally of course) and watch it like i would a PC

Maybe we all should start to seed (legal) videos that have been ready transcoded to tablets. That would eliminate the trouble ever one doing transcoding procress over and over again.

Psss...
Stargate Atlantis, Spoils Of War (42 min), 80 megs 253 Kbps real player file played out fine. High action scenes froze the screen, but this show is starting to be SCIFI soap so that docents hurt this so much.
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PRECISELY
but if there was just an app that could play high-res back smoothly, there would be no need- and we'd gain basically the ability of downloading movies on demand, anywhere (legally of course) - just find a Wi-Fi hotspot, and ur good to go!

I think that 624x352 is too heavy for the tablet to play back properly (depending on the frame rate, of course). Why not just queue up your files in a video converter overnight and have them in a format optimized for the device?

Obligatory plug (since I work on this product): http://www.nokia.com/betalabs/videoconverter

OR howbout someone develop an ON-DEVICE video converter (YES, ON MAEMO) not on a PC.

itd proably be slow, but if u could do it at all, thatd be amazing.

7PM - start LEGAL torrent download of movie at hotel, using wi-fi. Go out to restaurant
11PM - return to hotel, movie is finished. Open conversion app, let it go. - Go to sleep.
6AM - wake up, conversion is DONE. board train or plane for long trip back home, watch movie.

but someone tell me, why the hell cant the N800 playback high-res files to begin with? lack of hardware? my old PEntium II 266MHz with 64MB of RAM could do it in Windows 95, but this thing cant?

I use Handbrake to convert and on their website they say they have a linux
version. Wish someone here would convert it for use with n800. Although it would
be terribly slow. Just a thought. Let's hope n900 has a more robust cpu and
graphhics card. Dan

Mplayer can play some 624x352 videos perfectly, but it depends on bitrate. If bitrate is under 1000Kbps videos are usually not choppy.

Ha . . . hahaha. Yeah, no. Performance issues aside, I'm not even sure anybody has done any ARM video encoders.

Because the LCD resolution exceeds the ability of the SoC's built-in controller (limited to 640x480, LCD is 800x480), Nokia had to use a 3rd party LCD controller that is attached through a slow serial interface. This has three consequences, firstly, datarate and resolution to the controller is limited to about 1500Kbps and 400x240 respectively (not quite hard limits, as the heavy optimizations in mplayer show, but still), second, we are unable to use the built-in video decoder and, third, the performance of the built-in PowerVR would probably be sub-par, so we don't have drivers for it.

Thankfully, we shouldn't have any of these issues with the next NIT release.

You can get legal movies (some awesome, some horrrrrible) at

http://www.publicdomaintorrents.com

They offer a variety of formats. Unfortunately a lot of them are poorly seeded, so if you grab one, please seed as long as you can.

WRT the OP's question: Fastest player is mplayer. If that can't play your vid you're out of luck (save up for the N9x0).

hmm so hypothetically what resolution would the screen be and would it have 3d acceleration... oh and hypothetically what exact dimensions