I know I'm gonna get flamed for this one, but media playback on the NIT is horrible. I was really hoping that I wouldn't have to wrangle with my media to get them to work on the N800 but, yes, for every file, sure enough I have to re-encode. Kinda pathetic.

I download a lot of videos from video.google in mp4 formatted to play on any ipod. I end up having to re-encode those files in the Nokia Video Converter. Once that's done, they are both grainer than the original and at a much larger filesize.

And divx compatibility, forget about it. Non-existent. Yeah, I've read on her how some people are able to get divx avi's to play smoothly on their NIT's but I haven't found a single "out of the box" encoding setting that allows divx to even play at all. If you have a sure-fire set of params, please reply with them.

And it's not just video...

Can we get a audio player that's as functional as the built in Media player but with the ease of Navigation as Media box? I wish I could just mate these two apps and use the hybrid app alone.

And Canola? Why is everyone so excited over it? You can't even browse files in it. It's a pretty face with not much else there.

Yep, I started a rant.

Since the N800 is not suitable as a portable media player, why am I successful taking it with me on 7-mi jogs every other day? Why have I listened to infinite numbers of audiobooks on mine? When you say not successful, you are overgeneralizing. It works great playing mp3s and other stuff. I have never been theoretically happy with the idea of playing videos on a small screen anyway. And while I'm jogging I don't usually want to watch a movie. Certainly I've enjoyed watching Textra often enough. And Katie Couric. And I did watch Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, and some Netflix films, and listened to infinite numbers of radio shows and Verdi operas and issues of the audible Economist and Russian lessons.

So, you are saying that none of these things work??

I use it daily for watching episodes of Entourage on the bus to school everyday, and it works beautifully. If I don't feel like watching episodes, i listen to music - sounds great, works great.

Mplayer plays my DivX 6.0 encoded Entourage episodes perfectly - and they're at 512x288 - so i dont know wut ur talking about.

it would be nice to be able to just playback ANY divX file at any res tho, i know. i usually encode over night to avoid waiting

for music i think Canola and Kagu are great. Nokia's supplied one is okay, but its navigation is ******ed (i cant just PLAY ALL of a certain artist?).

for Video, mplayer is excellent. Very basic, but gets the job done, and smoothly.

BASICALLY i think it makes a very good portable media player, u just have to install the right apps. and thats not hard at all.

I know you're not looking for solutions, but since you're purposely muddying the water, I feel it's fair to say: if you install mplayer, you will be able to play avi files. Your "out of the box" requirement doesn't justify the title of your thread, but hey, if you prefer to feel negative, and complain about nothing, it's your prerogative.

Without having an extreme view, there are certainly valid points on both sides. The N800 works well enough as a media player for most motivated owners, but no question it wasn't designed primarily as a media player, and it's not as convenient to use as a dedicated media player. The software and controls layout could be much better, and the existing apps only go part-way toward achieving that (of course since it's an open platform, feel free to respond "if you're so smart, where's your media player?").

I tend to forgive the minor shortcomings on video playback, because none of my portable video players are ideal from the viewpoint of performance and compatibility. The N800 does ok if you realize that a 400 MHz ARM processor isn't going to keep up with 800x480x30fps video. I'm prepared to re-encode as necessary. Video iPods only do fine because they have smaller screens and many video sources produce iPod-encoded video already.

I think the real strength of the N800 as a media player is the range of options available: a wide variety of video and audio players, built-in FM tuner, WiFi connectivity for internet streaming sources, connection to UPNP servers etc.

I'm not saying that they don't work. They do work, but not well enough. Encoding/re-encoding video is over the heads of 90% of the media consuming market. I'm not necessarily referring to myself, I come from a a/v background and can make "things work". It's just that as it stands, the N8X0 is not ready for mass consumption.

And in general, with Audio, the problem is no playback but rather with unpolished apps. Sure they will play media, but with lousy navigation and horrendous UI's for the most part.

Canola LOOKS great but has the worst navigation of all the major media apps. Media Box looks and navigates just the way I want it to, but gets stuck/crashes on trying to play .trashes. I've tried Kagu (which I kinda like), Kilikali, MediaBox, Canola, XMMS (or whatever the hell its called (worst ever)) and the nokia media player and I have to say that the Nokia Media player despite having the least features and ridiculous navigation, plays most reliably.

I have had Mplayer installed on my N800 since the day I got it. And no, it often doesn't recognize the format of my avi's. It doesn't even play mp4's converted in the Nokia Converter without major chopping.

I can agree with some of that. And to be honest, I'm more playing devil's advocate here. I watch probably a 22 minute show/day and don't necessarily need to have all the bells and whistles, but jeez, it would be nice to not have to jump through hoops to make simple things work.

It depends on your expectations I guess.

As a music player it isn't bad (The iTunes/WinAmp Media Library -inspired organization is a bloody PITA - I want a nice responsive finger-friendly file browser and playlist damnit!), and it is incredibly good for streaming WM and RealPlayer videos, and shoutcast MP3 streams (Not OGG streams 'tho sadly).

However, coming from using TCPMP on a Clie TH55 and Tapwave Zodiac, I can honestly say that the video playback on the N800 is really bad.
The fact that the video that comes with the N800 jerks is not what I wanted to see!!

It should be *at least* as capable as a Palm T3, or a GP2x which it has a similar hardware to, but for some reason it falls very short; It is about as capable as my TH55, which has a 123MHz CPU and needs a video transform and rotate assist chip for final display!


Part of the crap performance is due to it being Linux, which is notorious for jerking/interrupting high-frametate playback because the scheduler isn't built for scheduling realtime-tasks (If they put in a newer kernel with the CFQ and kernel pre-empting, it will help this part a *lot*.).
The other part is, I suspect, down to the DSP going completely unused for video decoding (Or so I'm told... I don't understand why... something to do with LCD controllers being too slow?!
This is a big pity; When they fixed DSP support for the Media Player on the GP2x, the playback smoothness jumped an order of magnitude! (Still buggy as heck 'tho alas...)
Saay... I wonder if we can nick the GP2x MediaPlayer app? It's supposedly Linux and ARM code... :P


If you don't mind doing a bit of transcoding 'tho, videos are viewable okay on the N800. I use the same transcode profile I use when I want to play stuff on my TH55:
You can tweak the -s size param and the -b bitrate if the resultant vid is too ugly. Don't recommend boosting them too much 'tho because you creep back into jerkville again.
I haven't experimented much (I'm lazy), but I'm sure you could go up to at least -s 480x320 and -b 1024.

Be warned 'tho - The built-in MediaPlayer is infuriatingly picky about what it will and won't play. Like another thread posted, I have two properly encoded AVIs - One is XviD and the other DivX.
Everything I have can play them, and they're obviously properly MPEG4'd because even the Zod's strict DSP can work with them, yet the N800 will play the XviD, but not the DivX!
The funniest thing is when I transcoded it into a DivX again, it worked!

Additionally, the manual (Page 36 of the PDF) says the N8x0 supports a MAXIMUM resolution of CIF/QVGA...

I tend to use MPlayer, which is a bit weak in terms of features like "Controls" and "Options" and "Playlists" and "File Selectors"..., but like TCPMP it works quite well and is a lot less finicky than the built-in one. I'm gonna try VLC later when they sort out the deb, since hopefully then I'll be able to do things like switch subtitles...


You have to remember 'tho, that the N800 is not designed to be a media player - It is an Internet Tablet. Now, admittedly, I think it does a pretty bad job of that too, but like my Palm devices the, ability of the platform to run Other Stuff, gives it a powerful flexibility and lots of potential.
The thing is less than a year old and we're already hacking it six ways to sunday, so I'm sure things will improve.
If they can get full-screen video playing on a 123MHz TH55, I'm sure they'll be able to do it on the N800! (Espescially if they figure out how to leverage the DSP and whatever graphics chip this thing uses!)

I would be interested if there is any way to watch in2tv videos from AOL, work 3rd shift as a night watchman and to kill time watch old tv shows on laptop and would love to be able to watch these on my n800 and not have to drag laptop around. I basically have to just be awake over night, is even a little tv their but just nothing on at 3 am LOL. Also have IP network cameras that I need to check from time to time and they are in mp4 format, any sugestions on what viewer that I should install? Thanks, Steve