Does the VLC player on Nokia n900 work?
I found this http://www.nokiadistrict.com/vlc-player-for-nokia-n900/

It kind of works. For some. The question for you is; What do you want it to work with?

The only reason I ever installed it was to watch decent subtitles for movies, and that didn't work well on my machine but others reported no problems. For subtitles I ended up using the command line version of Mplayer, which is installable from the repo's.

This might sound an odd question but, can it be used to view/listen-to local media?

Edit: In the package manager, the description of VLC implies it's for playing media streamed on a local area network to the N900 so I wasn't sure if it was capable of playing local media too.

@demolition,

Not sure what program you're talking about but both local and remote files can be played with both the players mentioned here.

I guess MKV files or other HD videos. Also not all videos work on the default media player.

Actually, playing HD video is a question of hardware, not of file types. Most of the videos I'm playing on the default media player are encoded in MKV containers. But the N900's hardware is just a little underpowered for playing HD resolution data (not to mention that it has a screen that's much smaller than 720p, so you'll never see any benefit in quality when playing video of that size anyway).

There are some folks who have (by hook, crook, and overclocking) managed to coax 720p support on the N900; see this thread if you want to try it out yourself.

I personally optimize my videos for the screen size of the N900 before loading them onto the phone, so I really have no problem running anything I want to watch.

Yes VLC works but it is a cpu hog as it cannot use hardware acceleration. This last a a fairly significant issue. Development stopped before a finished version appeared, a casualty I suspect of the maemo dead-end.

SMPlayer works great wit subtitles, and it still has the option to download them from opensubtitles org. FYI.

So what's the best media player for the N900?

I use an Mplayer fronend called SIB and it works great.