Notices

Hi, I purchased my Nokia N810 today and love it. I will soon be adding video and pictures to my device, and was wondering what's the most popular or 'best' media player/media viewer to use?

I am hoping an experienced member here can guide me as I know there are several different types of media player. With no Internet Access on the device yet, I cannot experience them all to decide what I like best.

I recommend Canola. It has the best UI by far (very smooth and finger-friendly), a bunch of themes and plugins, and is very easy to use.

Although Canola is nice, I prefer MediaBox.

Thanks guys, I will check out both Conola and Mediabox, but from what I see on Conola, it looks fantastic

I downloaded Canola and Mplayer (I want to try Mediabox and will do later)

Canola looks fantasic and it's easy to use. Mplayer has no touch screen support for the menu, it's hard to fast forward the track and the libary list is just plain text. I transferred an array of video files from my PC to my N810 and tested them out on the 2 media players, as well as Nokia's default media player.

Out of the 3 players, Canola had trouble running most of my videos, while the default player played half ok. Mplayer had trouble with only the HD mp4 files and I think WMV. Every other format I tried worked fine.

I have a video of planets in space, where it zooms out of our galaxy and into another. Canola was able to play this AVI file but there was odd artifacts in the black and the video ran a little slow. In Mplayer, it ran perfectly. I have a music video and with Canola, the video's width is squashed but in Mplayer it plays fullscreen perfectly.

Canola is nice but I like Mplayer much better. I will keep both installed though as Canola is good for Youtube and may play other formats that Mplayer cannot.

I have 2 questions:

1) How do I set my default media player to Mplayer?

2) Are there plugins for Mplayer. Canola or the default player that allow support for more formats?

Thanks

You know you really should recode your videos for the NIT. If you optimize the videos they will play flawless in Canola.

Clinton

Freakair, yes, I understand, I do this for my Nintendo DSi so they run better (or run at all). What would you suggest I encode them to? I have suitable software on my computer for this but I have many options, which video format works best? What is the maximum bitrate or dimensions a video can be before the N810 has a problem?

MPEG4 video at 30fps or less around 1000Kbps, at a resolution no greater than 400x240 (fit whichever dimension hits the edge first depending on aspect ratio) with MP3 audio—perfect playback, every time.

This is a copy and paste form a post by GeneralAntillies, but it's pretty much what I've been using for the last year on the N800. Works well for me.

I shall try it but I have some HD MPEG4 files and they do not play with Canola, and Mplayer can run them but it's extremely slow.

Please see "Video encoding" in the Wiki.