I use my PDA to stream episodes of Simpsons/Family guy etc via my home network. Is this possible with N800?

1. Are there any media players with xvid/divx codec available?
2. Is the CPU powerfull enough to play a 320x240 xvid clip @25fps?
3. How is WLAN working - is it only for web access? Are files and folders shared on computers available just like files on SD-cards for instance?

I'm not sure if you can stream it or not, my guess is yes because the bandwidth is there, I have tried mounting samba fs and I can transfer files with breeze. But there is a problem, playing most codec. It play well on certain codec w/ certain specific format, which mean, you have to re-encode your movies. I'll try this and report it. WLAN is a full fledge working Wireless Networking, unless you decide to put your own firewall up. As I said before, install samba and you can stream from your windows box, but you need to mount it via terminal, there is no GUI for that.

The movies I encoded w/ Media Converter at 400x240 is playing fine. It's probably playing around 20fps, I believe it encoded at 23fps, but there is definitely some drop frame, and you can't fast forward it. But the same movie store on the SD is playing smoothly. The movies I decided to encode is "Last Exile" episode 1 , "First Move" It's an Anime about 24 mins long for the 1st episode. I have not use Media Streamer, but I have try watching divx/xvid streaming through cifs, and it's ugly, jerky(and one in a while, very jerky and some time look stuck), worse than one formatted for Nokia. BTW, you might need both cifs and smbfs if you connecting to windows box.

Yes, MPlayer supports xvid/divx codecs, and CPU has more than enough power to play 320x240 videos. Actually I'm testing it with 512x384 videos now and it works without dropping frames most of the time (be sure to install the latest version, that is at least mplayer_1.0rc1-maemo.10). Unfortunately right now it suffers from image tearing which makes watching video not so enjoying, but that will be fixed later.

You can search around, some people used streaming with Nokia 770 quite successfully.

Thanks for your replies!

My purpose is to be able to play files that are not in anyway "prepaired" for the device and if MPlayer is ported to meomo, it sounds like that will be possible

Regarding mounting of network drives - if i do that using terminal - will there be any problems when i'm not connected to the network anymore? (other than an error when trying to open a file) E.g will i need to reconnect it using terminal after i reconnect to the network?

I have mounted my 200gb data partition on windows via cifs and use canola to play (stream) music and other stuff. When I disconnect from my network, the files are all simply "lost" until I reconnect and mount the stuff again.When I have time again, I'll try to make a script which checks my connection and mounts my shares. Would be nice if I can access the Connect/Disconnect menu bar from within the console and bypass some stuff that helps me mount/umount my share automatically. There must be some scripts for wlan connections that can be used. The final goal would be to seperate between your remote share from different locations and mount the right ones automatically. Like one share @home or one another share @work or @home2 ...
Since I have ifconfig/iwconfig I always have a status where I am connected to. Hmm...Ok...
I am looking forward to try something when I have time again.
Oh yeh, one big problem with canola right now is that you have to scan you library again when you disconnect and start canola again while still disconnected. Also I can't connect to localhost configuration server while offline (wtf?), but that's another canola beta2 story

I have had N800 for about a week, with two 4GB 150X SD cards and latest OS.

Here are the two major problems:

1. The Video is poor. Jerky, with frequent freezes.

I installed MPlayer. I used Media Converter to convert a DivX file and a DVD VOB file, using High and then Medium settings. Nothing helps. Even the included Nokia clip plays jerky.

Interestingly, MPlayer takes somewhere from 30 sec up to a minute to load.

2. The wireless card seems to be less sensitive that in the laptop. I only get good connection at home in areas with "excellent" or "Very strong" signal. Forget about public WiFI access points.

It seems to me that the device does not live up to consumer expectations.

May be it is my device (or me)?

1. Nokia have indicated there will be significant video improvements in the next release (due "real soon now")

2. That's odd - there have been several posts in this forum which would say the opposite, that the N800 is more sensitive than many laptops.

Might be you It lives up to my expectations in that it's an unfinished device and will improve once Nokia get a handle on the firmware and optimise the software for the device. Since I'm a former user of the 770 from November 2005 (ie. initial release) this seems to be the way Nokia operate with these devices - first firmware is poor, second firmware is much better. It's not ideal I admit, but it's still better (==more fun) than WinCE!

"2. The wireless card seems to be less sensitive that in the laptop. I only get good connection at home in areas with "excellent" or "Very strong" signal. Forget about public WifI access points."

Before I owned my N800, I had used a Dell Axim X5 with compact flash network card to surf the Internet; WIfi.
From the same locations, the N800 finds more Wifi connections than the X5 did.

But yet in my house, the X5 always had difficulties connecting to my computer's Westel wireless modem/router. No such problem with the N800; so that pleases me much.

Hmm. It does find a lot of locations indeed, but when I try to connect I usually get a network error or something like that. It only connects when the signal is III or IIII.

Anyway, will wait for the new release.

Thanks