Give me a break with single core card.
I have a Raspberry Pi board with single core 700MHz and it runs XBMC and all videos play.
It's a software related issue. I can open the video and play it in 3rd party apps, but it's very slow. So that means no hardware acceleration.
There's your problem, probably frontend of the player is not connected or there are no drivers to the GPU.
Write that and we are all happy

lol..
stop fighting ...
now tell me how to delete this thread. Hhahah

Pi uses a Broadcom SOC...again the sgx530 is a worse performer than the Broadcom SOC...

So like i said earlier its not the processor but the GPU...

some of the 720p vids dont work while others do. Whats wrong with it.
second, if i convert 1080p , it does play 1080p. What doea poor gpu do then??

haha come on knobtviker.. the Raspberry Pi has one of the most powerful mobile GPUs there is. It's twice as powerful as the iPhone 4S's GPU.

Source:

http://www.geek.com/articles/mobile/...ance-20120125/

But what thedead1440 said is right.

N8 uses Broadcom BCM2727 GPU which is capable of producing 32 Mtriangles/sec and has dedicated 3D Graphics HW accelerator. This GPU is still a very powerful one today and you can witness that by just transferring 720p or 1080p videos and playing normally without any lag.

N9 on the other hand uses a PowerVR SGX530 GPU, which is capable of producing only 14 Mtriangles/sec. Also, a point to be noted is that the iPhone 3GS, which is around 3 years old, uses a SGX535 GPU, which is slightly better than the 530 version N9 uses. You can see the result, as the N9, even after PR1.3 update, stutters a bit even while playing the low bitrate 720p videos recorded by the device itself.

This is sad, because everything about the N9 was looking good, but Nokia just had to ruin the game. Damn. BUT, it is also possible that there are less drivers and codecs available for Harmattan to actually play any video properly. Having said that, video performance can be improved to an acceptable extent, if there is further development on the software part.

Just a side note: N900 has the same SGX530 GPU which N9 uses. But Nitdroid can run 720p videos smoothly and even on Maemo, with overclocking and other tweaks.

The Android "fad" has convinced a lot of people that dual/quad core cpus are needed in order to record 1080 videos, to play great 3d games, to serf the web correctly, etc etc

Well that isn't true.

So that's true... wow
I mean, I've read it couple of times here and there but now I believe it.

N9 has a weaker GPU than S^3 line.. And I mean the 1st gen S^3 line (E7,N8,C7 etc)

wow

Well we are talking about Nokia here...

No matter how much I hate to admit but Nokia have never released a complete flagship phone that could be considered the best among the competition in all aspects...

Don't even get me started on the stupid categorization of Series by E, N & C...E7 vs N8 is a prime example of the really stupid competition that used to exist within Nokia...

There was a time...
* 2002, it was called 7650. (the P800 followed months later)
* 2004, the 7710 (if you exclude its slow 150mhz cpu. it kicked P-Series in the balls)
* 2005 the N91 (though released a whole year later)
* 2006-7 .. the N95
* 2009 , the N900
* 2010, N8

But my lg optimus black(has same gpu with n9) almost play anything smoothly (except 1080p of course), i think n9 need more codecs