I haven't tried movies on the n810 yet, but the included vid clips look great to me. And I'm a former PP3 owner. I agree that the Pepper did movies really well, and did web surfing better than the n810 does in most regards. But the platform was closed and the company was clearly on a deathspiral. That's why I gave it up.

I'll try to convert some vids tonight to see how they look, but my first pass with the Nokia converter ended badly, with the program hanging at 99% conversion. Anyone have thoughts on that problem?

EDIT: oops, just noted that this was in the n800 thread, so my 810 experience is somewhat irrelevant.

Pepper is in bad form, and most development is in standby, I agree. But it's a bit premature to call it "closed" and in any case, the community is hard at work to get a "standard" Linux distro ready. As usual, the main problem is the closedness of several drivers.

What video converter do you use? Personally, I'm a big fan of this one: Fast, just enough options and it yet has to hang on me.

Add me to the "N800 is not a good PMP" crowd.

I had high hopes for OS2008, but the new media player plays none of my handbrake-encoded x264 or DivX/xVid movies. Chokes on every single one. Mplayer tries to work but is choppy.

Now if you transcode, (something I was opposed to also) you get very good performance. But it's simply not possible to copy a movie from my media server to the N800 and have it work.

@Karel: yeah, Pepper's not dead, but I just got tired of waiting for promises to be fulfilled. And I wanted something a little more portable. The downside is that the Nokia is a lot less useful in my home than the PP3 was, but it's a lot more likely to be useful outside of the home because I always have it with me.

As for encoders... I don't know which one I'm using. I thought it was the official Nokia one. The one you pointed to looks a lot better. I'll check it out tonight. I was surfing around last night on these boards and found one that seemed good that did DVD --> n800 in one click, but I didn't get a chance to check it out yet.

I believe Handbrake will do DVD-to-N800, but you'll need to tweak its settings for that. I take the easy road and turn a DVD into a Divx+MP3 with Handbrake, and then run that file through N800 Video Convert, mainly because the latter is so blindingly fast.

Nokia really needs to get a team and make a official video player that is ultra optimized and can play videos with 640 X 480 resoultion.

I have only had my N800 for a few days, but I found it to works well with movies etc, provided they are encoded correctly, even with the default media application.

To put some of my own DVD movies onto my N800, I use DVD Decrypter to rip the VOB files to my HD and then use Handbrake to encode for N800.

I use the following settings in Handbrake:

• Source = file (.vob)
• Title "automatic"
• MPEG 4
• AAC (48kHz / 160 kbps)
• 400x224
• No Crop
• Anamorphic PAR unchecked
• Chapter Markers unchecked
• Avg Bitrate 600 to 700 (kbps)

These settings work pretty well and the movies play pretty smoothly. File size is relatively large (7-800MB+ per 120 minute movie), but memory cards are cheap and small.

I hope this helps...

Cheers!

Blue Sky

Please no! We've all seen many times what happens whenever Nokia decides to produce some "optimized" software fir the Itablet platform.

I've been nothing but impressed with the media capabilities of this little guy, since getting it a few weeks ago. I think the screen is just beautiful (I've gotten comments on it any time I've had it out) and the flexibility is astounding. Some things play better than others - the firefly series I have, which is encoded at something like TV quality (500ish by 300something) plays flawlessly, but the Planet Earth HD series bogs down pretty frequently - to be fair though, not even my divx compatible DVD player can play it without choking from time to time.
The most astounding moment for me is when I got TVersity running with Canola. It transcodes and streams on the fly, and on my 802.11g network it plays flawlessly, without any hiccups whatsoever.
Canola for me made the device really come together for media - you've got everything there in one place, in a really mobile friendly application. I tried Kagu and UKMP and both of them were unstable, slow, and kind of confusing for me.
It works great to sling media to any other stereo, too, as long as you get the $10 worth of cables from radio shack. I now can have my entire MP3 collection sitting available on top of my frontroom entertainment center.

Are you sure n800 works with Slingbox?