Higher quality at the expense of battery life??? How long will you be able to watch videos before your phone goes dead?

Over 8 hours according to GSMArena test. (even longer if you keep the brightness down) Well, Galaxy Note has even a bigger battery than SGS2. But bigger screen. So i expect it to last similar to SGS2 for video playback. My brother in law who is a Samsung mobile phone hardware engineer told me that Galaxy Note's SoC is more efficient than SGS2's SoC also. (he also said it can be overclocked more. lol)

http://blog.gsmarena.com/nokia-n9-do...e-charge-test/

Also, keep in mind that SGS2 has a 0.4" bigger display with more sub-pixels than N9. It's actually the best you can get right now if you are going on some 14 hour flight as SGS2 has replaceable batteries unlike iPhone4/SGS2. So you can simply pop another fully charged battery and you have another 8 hours. That's not possible (without a screwdriver) on most recent Nokia phones (N8, E7, X7, N9 etc) as well as iPhone4/4S. N900 doesn't last as long as N9 or SGS2 but at least it also has a replaceable battery. (I have 2 spare) Anyways, who watches 8 hours straight of video? Even I don't do that. I took my Nokia E7 for my recent 10 hour plane trip and I watched around 5 hours of video and still had some juice left over. I was more than happy with that. (but yeah, if I was going to UK from Sydney, it would be over 18 hour flight (including transfers) and for that my N8, E7, N9 etc won't be enough. I also do not want to carry some battery charger. just not convenient. (popping in a new battery is soooooo much better. No butts about it.)

I wish N9 came with STE U8500 SoC as was in the initial rumor.

Possible 8 hours, but not at 720p resolution. I wonder what video the N9 managed to decode for so long. It must have also been in offline mode.

SGNote has the SoC manufactured at a smaller process, hence the higher clock and efficiency.

No idea what video they used. Also, I can't really say how accurate or comparable the results are between the different phones. (I questioned this in the comment section) But regardless, the DSP wouldn't use significantly more power for 720p video. It's what it's designed to do anyways. Maybe it'll shorten the battery life by 10-20% at most.

Yeah, Galaxy Nexus is interesting but for my "video" needs. It's definitely on my list of phones to get right now. (I also like the fact that it has a fairly accurate "built-in" stylus like the N900) OS is Android but I guess I'll have to live with that if Nokia doesn't do much more with Harmattan for their future phones.

Thank you guys, will make a try with Handbrake although it will take some time, maybe its possible to have handbrake automatically scan a folcer on the pc and encode copies of movies as they arrive?

I imagine it is possible, but I'm not sure I would want to do that -- Handbrake requires a lot of processing to perform its job, and if (like me) you often have multiple hours of video to convert, it will happily consume all your CPU cycles for hours...

So I usually only want to start Handbrake during those times I won't be using my computer. (It does have a handy "pause" feature for those times you want to wrest back control of your CPU.)

I appreciate your answer, but I am a little picky...lol. If you guys are using Handbrake, then I'd like to use it as well. I tried searching settings for 720p baseline profiles but had no success... Whenever you have some free time at home, could you please just specify which setting to change in order to convert an (torrent-originated...) 720p mkv high to 720p mkv baseline profile. (Being again picky to choose mkv over mp4)

Those who have many HD videos will care, those who dont, dont . The restriction is the internet speed - downloading a 1GB+ vid takes a lot longer than 350MB if the speed aint fast(& service provider says cannot upgrade any faster).

Btw, what sort of files can be played using the VLC player on N9? Has anyone tried rmvb files though I suppose not since ya all dont watch chinese shows

My current version of Handbrake (0.9.5) is pretty good about providing info on every available encoding option, I get a fairly detailed tooltip by just hovering the mouse above each option. But in short, once you've picked H.264 as your video codec on the "Video" tab, the way to make it a baseline profile is to switch to the "Advanced" tab, and make sure "Maximum B-Frames" are set to 0 and "CABAC Entropy Coding", "8x8 Transform", and "Weighted P-Frames" are all switched off. That should do it for you.

And yeah, I'll say it again -- playing 720p video on a cell phone is a waste of CPU cycles. Drop the resolution to the machine's native screen size, and use the savings in pixel count to increase the bitrate instead! (Although if you're starting from a heavily compressed video to begin with, I suppose that doesn't really matter.)

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem much advantage to choosing the mkv container over the mp4 one for the Nokia phones. At least on my N900, the default Media Player doesn't seem to support alternate audio tracks or any sort of subtitles. Without that, most of the advantages of using the Matroska container are lost...

this is what i'm using currently; pass it the path to the source file. i use it to make phone-ready files based on raw mkv files.

#!/bin/bash

get_file_from_path() {
OIFS=$IFS
IFS='/'
for x in $1
do
OUTPUT=$x
done
IFS=$OIFS
}

get_file_from_path $1

OUTPUT="${OUTPUT%.*}.mp4"

echo $OUTPUT

ENCODE="-s 720x480 -aspect 16:9 -b 1024k -bt 512k"
FORMAT="-f mp4"

VQ="-mbd rd -flags 4mv+part+aic -trellis 2 -cmp 2 -subcmp 2 -g 300 -bf 3"
VIDEO="-vcodec mpeg4 $VQ"
AQ="-strict experimental -ab 192k -ac 2"
AUDIO="-acodec aac $AQ"

/usr/bin/ffmpeg -y -i $1 $ENCODE $VIDEO $AUDIO $FORMAT $OUTPUT