Members keep talking about how awesome and powerful the N900 hardware is but it really isn't that special. Many of the features on the N900 have been around on other phones before and if you are referring to the processor and graphics, they really aren't very special either.

I downloaded a couple of media files (music videos) in flv format. The quality is good but not amazing. I would have thought that the N900 should be able to handle it no problem but, firstly the default media player does not play the videos at all, even after installing the extra codecs from the repositories. Then I tried mplayer with SiB which does actually play the media but the video runs so slow that is falls completely out of sync with the audio. I also tried KMPlayer and had the same problem. This happens with other media formats as well. (avi, mp4, mpg)

Running the same videos on an old P3 800MHz which is the oldest hardware I've got lying around, the video plays 100% smoothly and only uses around 40% CPU at most. (I used vlc media player on Win XP and system has 512MB memory)

For the cost of the the device why can't the N900 handle the music videos?

i think the n900 is very picky with the codec and bitrate of a movie file.

for example, when you play the n900-video which is on the device already, it looks fantastic and perfectly smooth.
then i copied a movie which looks mediocre on my computer to the n900 and it would stutter quite a bit.
other movies, that look quite good on the computer, run well on the n900.

Firstly are you using Linux on that P3?
Secondly, I don't think the Cortex A8 is close to as fast as a P3 800!

A PC is x86 architecture, the N900 is ARM, very different beasts. One is an ancient CPU design that just has newer stuff stuck on it each time its revised with little concern for what effect this has on power consumption, the other is carefully crafted with battery life in mind, they are not remotely comparable to each other. Now add to that the fact that the PC has many many years of x86 optimisations on its codecs (and because new features are just stuck on you can rely on them still being there on newer versions of the CPU), you can't expect the same kind of optimisation on a ARM CPU as they might have to remove older optimisations to save on power consumption, cost and size (they have to be super small and energy efficient to save on battery and heat dissipation).

Linux is primarily written for x86 and not everything can just be recompiled for ARM and work the same, anything CPU intensive will often have architecture specific optimisations which you basically have to throw away when changing architectures. So those years of optimisations for PC have to be rewritten, as such some codecs might simply not be available at all for the N900 as they were written specifically for PC hardware.

PCs do not have to worry about power consumption so can include all the old inefficient tricks on their newer CPUs, whereas something like ARM is trying to squeeze as much as possible out of your battery, so they have to be really picky about what they include in there. Video playback on Linux on PCs is still hit and miss today to some extent, so its no surprise the N900 is that bit worse. The fact is on PC you can playback many video files purely on the CPU with no help from the GPU, the N900 CPU has no chance at doing that which is why its so picky as GPU acceleration relies on much stricter rules than CPU playback, again because hardware optimisations have to be tightly refined for power consumption and cost.

As for "Many of the features on the N900 have been around on other phones before", well no **** sherlock. We don't buy the N900 necessarily for those "many" features, we buy it for the ones that aren't around on other handsets. I myself came from Windows Mobile which has always multi-tasked, but I have never been able to play music and use the web browser at the same time in any usable fashion before, the music would just break up too much. And I have never been able to stay online all the time before, as Windows Mobile turned off WiFi when in standby thus taking me offline, the N900 keeps me online all the time.

So please THINK before you make bold claims, there are many things the N900 does that older handsets did, but it does them better. There are some things it does worse, but video playback is not one of them. Only now are handsets coming out supporting the wide variety of formats the N900 supports and even then in reality they will have limitations. Sure its not perfect, but if you can find a handset that is then by all means go buy it.

You should rephrase the question to "Why can't N900 play _my_ videos smoothly?" because for many users it plays smoothly. It greatly depends on the codec, resolution, and bitrate, though. If you give the phone the type of media it likes, then you'll get great results.
Just because there's no iTunes you have to squeeze (transcode) your videos through for loading them onto the device doesn't mean that they will all play fine without transcoding.

If you consider that an 800MHz P3 can handle video with 40% CPU usage, which is around 320MHz, then it seems reasonable to expect the 600Mhz processor in the N900 to be able to handle the same content at 100% with the changes in architecture for battery savings etc.

I don't expect to be able to play super high quality videos on my N900 but the videos I'm trying to play are not even very high quality and yet the audio and video falls completely out of sync making it absolutely pointless to watch.

Perhaps Linux and the specific media players are the cause of the video playback problems due to the lack of optimization for the ARM architecture but if this is the case, is there any hope of improvements that will make it possible to play video content more smoothly?

I didn't ask for a perfect phone and I didn't say I expect N900 to be perfect, it certainly has plenty of downfalls that I have seen and accepted but I though it was reasonable to expect the device to be able to do something as simple as playing back videos in a reasonable quality while no other applications are running in the background.

i cant speak for flv since i havent tried them on my n900 yet, but all of the mpeg, mp4, avi and wmv vids i've thrown at it are played smoothly no problem. only grumble is the way it plays at 200% speed for the first second or two after using the play bar

I play 1 gig unopptimized avi's with no problem. I do switch much of everything off to do so though...what are you running in the background?

I also loath flv though.

Is there a simple way to check the details of my videos to find out if they are within a reasonable resolution and bit rate? The specific files I want to play on my N900 are flv files and I don't know where to see the info in question.

If I convert the media files I don't want the audio and video to degrade too much because they are already not particularly fantastic and I would like to be able to connect my N900 to my TV and watch the videos without them being too grainy.

The N900 plays Videos beautifully, and at better than DVD quality remember the resolution of the display. However the codecs will not support anything over 800x480.

Try some that I made up

on the fast cars thread

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php...ight=fast+cars

Many of these were transcoded from FLVs

If I try to play large files which tend to be good quality, say 700MB movie for example (avi), the files do not play properly. The video is smoothe but slow, which causes it to fall behind the audio. This gets worse the longer the video plays. I'm using Mplayer with SiB.

I do not run anything else in the background while playing videos.

I have checked the CPU usage when videos are playing and it runs at 100% almost constantly until I stop the video and then it drops down to less than 5%

I have managed to play some videos smoothly but it's almost always the low quality videos. The videos that I really want to play almost always have video / audio sync issues.