i played a video ( 720p -408 ) on km player ,was so slow .
i tried osso media server ,npp and mplayer .osso media server was a little better than other two .
can anything be done by tweaking to play it fluently ?

The only time this has been relevant to me was when i used my N95, it has a res of just 320x240, but could play 640x480 and this was good when connecting to the TV, but as stated before we get lower res on the TV then on the native N900 screen so here it does not help.

But i do understand the not having to convert thing, if you where to convert 8 movie s then it will take up to 16hours depending on system
But again, you just use more power on the N900 etc etc....

Might have missed this if already been discussed ... I believe the gpu can power different res from the screen size. This is pointless except when viewing on a larger screen. Apart from films etc, this would be useful for things like EasyDebian.
I know the video drivers for Maemo5 are ess-aych-one-tee but wondered whether anyone knows how to not just scale output but rasterise it differently?
Does the video out have to use the same framebuffer as the device screen?
If all of this is answered elsewhere, please don't flame me - just point me to the source.

Composite Video out: (16:9)
NTSC: 720×480
PAL: 720×576
these are MAX resolution, so again no gain here

i didn't mean just for a tv but for monitors too, hence asking about whether the video out can come direct from the frambuffer. And, whether the framebuffer can be told to have a different resolution to the screen? I'm thinking more for displaying the mini ED interface and similar at a usable size.

I REALLY don't get why some people reckon 720p playback is a waste. I guess those who say this are people who do not watch a lot of videos on their mobile phones or do not know what the true benefit of 720p/1080p playback capability means. Who cares if the LCD is only 800x480 resolution? I still want my N900 or any other phone to play 720p or higher resolution videos. Because it means I am not restricted to playing only low resolution content. It means I don't have to waste hours converting. It means I only need to keep 1 copy of the video and not 2 or 3 on my PC. So I really hope we get 720p playback capability on the N900 using Maemo5 OS. (not Nitdroid)

of course it would be nice to play every video clip regardless of res, but i cant justify the extra space needed when:
LCD/screen can't display more then 800x480
TV-OUT can't display more then 708x524 (or there about)

but again it would be nice to play any clip without lags etc..

In theory now in maemo with kernel 48 , you can see 1280x720, i readed it but i did not tried it.

No, You can not. Patched kernel modules are present, but we still lack modified userland components. Fortunately, AFAIK there are not closed source components involved, so, eventually, it will be possible.

For me, more important is recording videos @ 720p This also should be possible with modified userland part, + already present kernel modules.

the whole point of playing 720p on your n900 is that you don't have to convert it. If I have to go somewhere by train for example, it would be nice if I could just put my freshly downloaded 720p vid on my phone, and not wasting any time converting. If I had to convert all those movies/tvshows, I'd be wasting months of times and gigabytes of hdspace.

I have more space on my phone than I have time for converting.