Has anyone used the Any Video Converter program? I just had it installed in my new Windows 7 and would like to convert a couple of videos to N900. Does anybody know at what settings (format, Bitrate, resolution, sample rate) the N900 uses?

No need for conversions as N900 plays almost any popular format as it is

nmik-3

converting and transcoding videos prior to copying to the machine is still useful.
a smaller file with lower bit rate will decompress using less cpu than a high bitrate file.

i dont know how much it will effectively make of a difference, but if I was getting on a long flight, I would try to do all I could to optimize battery life.

Can it play mkv format?
I have some Japanese anime which are all in the mkv format.

http://maemo.nokia.com/n900/specifications/

* Wide aspect ratio 16:9 (WVGA)
* Video recording file format: .mp4; codec: MPEG-4
* Video recording at up to 848 × 480 pixels (WVGA) and up to 25fps
* Video playback file formats: .mp4, .avi, .wmv, .3gp; codecs: H.264, MPEG-4, Xvid, WMV, H.263

If you install mplayer from repositories, I think it will support mkv format, but I'm not sure.

What att stated is pretty much spot on.

Something else to think about if you are going to re-encode them you can make it into another container if mkv isn't supported.

"Most" encode applications will also rip the subs from anime as well.

For the other part you asked about I would try something like the following;
Video Rate - 900kbps @25FPS variable
Audio Rate - 192kbps @44100
MPG4 encode or H264

This is about 2 steps up from my Nokia N97 encode settings. I don't have a N900 but I would imagine these settings would play very crisp while giving out no distortion or artifact effects.

Again I don't have a N900 so I can't test but I am going to do the same thing with mine, download my Anime into it for on the go watching.

I will try this out once i receive the phone. Many Thanks

Anytime, If I find out some very optimal video settings / file size ratio I will post them somewhere here on the boards.

I just wish I was a lucky one who got a pre-production unit.

If anyone else does some or a lot of video encoding post your rates, be interesting to see what plays well on N900 while keeping the filesize down.

The built-in media player seems to be at an advantage at the moment as it uses HW acceleration for certain formats - namely mp4, wmv9, avc (aka m4v) and h264.

For example the shipped demo trailer for '9' is a .mp4 (MPEG4 + AAC audio) with a full 800x480 resolution at a whopping ~4000kbps rate and unless you have some background tasks running it's pretty smooth.

If disk space is an issue, that would probably mean going for h264, but more serious measurements would be be needed to tell exactly how much juice can you save by going with a lower bitrate.

I have rendered some different video formats in this thread: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=33128

The video is a mix of slow and fast scenes and there is a timecode counter there which counts each frame so its very effective to look at that and see if it slows down somewhere.

I would love to see what format uses most cpu etc on n900. Too see what is more effective..