sadly i sold my N8, trust me, download any 1080p video from youtube, but you can't transfer a file more than 2.4Gb cuz the hard file system is FAT32

currently N9 suppoort :
Wide codec support: H.263, MPEG4-SP & ASP, H.264 BP/MP, WMV9 / VC-1 and Mkv (Matroska)
HD playback support: MPEG-4 SP, H.264 BP
HD capture support: MPEG4-SP

maybe its driver matter atm,

I digged a little further and found for example that while the iphone 3GS/4 has almost the same GPU as the N9, it has a VXD core that takes all the video decoding (all profiles) (ie GPU + media core). Quite hard to find very precise specs for the N9 or for TI to know what the N9 hardware is capable of. Maybe someone else could tell.

Edit:
@cloud596: thanks for the precisions.

I also have a N8 and he is right. The gpu on the N8 is just beastly, shame the processor isn't quite at the same level...

Glad my wife went for the N8, its great.
Personally I'm happy to stick with my N900.
The N9 doesn't feel that great at all. Sure, it's a nice linux distro alright, but it comes packaged in something I don't know what it's supposed to compete with.
They hade the chance to come up with a great successor to the N900 with a physical keyboard, but nooooo. Let's screw it up completely and then fix all the stuff that should be there from the beginning to be fixed in the updates.
No wonder the Nokia company is going south,
As a final little joke before falling into the grave they shack up with Microsoft and their newest crappy failure.

Sigh, what am I gonna do, the only good thing out there is still the N900. I better buy a couple of extras in case mine some day goes junk.

See this thread if you want to keep the N9 V N900 thing going
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=78991
Read the posts before voting in the pole (if you care to vote).

OKAY..... This thread is going out of control with the wrong facts.....

N9 uses OMAP 3630 which has a fairly weak IVA 2+ DSP. (same as N900 but faster clock)
http://focus.ti.com/general/docs/wtb...ontentId=52606

N9 can play 720p videos perfectly fine. It does on my N9. Just make sure it's either encoded in xvid or H264 "base" profile. Unfortunately (??) most "warez scene" x264 mkv releases on the web use minimum "main" profile which the N9's DSP cannot handle. I can confirm that my N9 plays 1280x720p H264 base profile video in mkv/mp4 etc container without any issues. Same for 720p xvid with 6-channel AC3 audio in an AVI container. (container doesn't really matter I guess)

So yeah, N9 can play 720p videos. Just not the ones you find from the torrent sites that's all. =P

BTW, N8 cannot play H264 "High" profile videos. (EDIT: It can play High profiles.My mistake. But it can't handle some encoding setting still so it's not fool proof) I own an N8 also. I've never tried 1080p videos on N8 however. So no idea there. I doubt it can though as Broadcom used on N8 is only good for 720p afaik. But the newer Broadcom GPU used on the new Belle phones can support 1080p in HW. But it seems Nokia only made them capable of 720p just for the sake of not making a Symbian phone the first Nokia phone to do 1080p. =P

I've just been testing my N9's decoding capabilities with x264. Seems like at least 854x480 video with main profile, but without any bframes plays back just fine. I need to do some more testing if number of bframes and/or reference frames affects it.

I've also asked the experts if they have any insight to this problem.
https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=162802

But what about this specs page?
http://europe.nokia.com/find-product...specifications

Does that just mean it recognises MP, but can't play it

It can play H264 main profile. But that doesn't mean it can handle 720p resolution at it. The spec page doesn't mention what resoltion/bitrate/settings it supports for each codec that it supports. From my testing, it can play lower SD resolution main profile fairly okay. But not when it's a higher resolution. It struggles big time.