Notices

I've had my N900 for 2 months with no problems, then a day ago I tried to play a video and it wouldn't play. Same with music. Even the promo vid that Nokia preinstall. I soft reset the device (no joy) and re-flashed it using the NSU, but no luck.
Everything else is fine. If I restart the N900 it will play a video for about a minute and after that it wont play anything, video or music. I get 1 message saying "media content not supported" and then all vids and music do not play, no messages are displayed.
It still displays my pics.
Any help is appreciated, but I am a "Noob" at this so any informative suggestions would need to be written as if I'm an idiot.
Thanks to all.

reflash it with Flasher 3.5 might help solve your issues. Mine is having the headphone problem right now. It won't connect to it and it already found in the dmesg | tail

Thanks, will try that, but as I've said I'm a Noob at this so I may post back with problems.

The video is longer than one minute? It simply stops in the middle of the video? That sounds like a bug.

That part is https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6823 and will be fixed in the next update. (No need for more comments on that bug report.)

Some vids are not longer than one minute. I have a vid that is about 15 seconds and that will not play.

It is a clear description of bug 8165, see - https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8165

So, you have 3 options:

1. Find an offensive file which causes your gst-video-thumbnailerd stack and delete it

2. Wait until 10.2010.07-6 or latest version is released

3. Do a workaround -

a) killall gst-video-thumbnailerd
b) and for more permanent effect - install KMPlayer and forget about system media player until 10.2010.07-6 or later revision is published.

Thank you egoshin. As I said I'm new to this. I entered the kill command in xterm and it told me "no processes killed". Videos still wont play.
If I cant kill the process will KMPlayer still work? And after reading the bug reports I realized I also have the 'battery drain' problem.
Gotta shelve N900, cant use it
Thanks

Use not 'kill' but 'killall gst-video-thumbnailerd'.

The "kill" command requires process-id (you can find it via "ps" command) but "killall" works on process name.

KMPlayer - it has the same problem as system media player because it uses the same mafw-gst-renderer process. However, it doesn't start automatically gst-video-thumbnailerd and so, it plays many times after N900 OFF-ON. System media player plays ONCE and automatically starts gst-video-thumbnailerd ---> it prevents playing file a second time.

BTW, you may need to do a couple of attempts because until gst-video-thumbnailerd gets some thumbnail it tries to run that file again and again. So - use "killall gst-video-thumbnailerd" without hesitation.


Battery problem - you may try to execute in xterm (as root!) commands:

echo "1" >/sys/power/sr_vdd2_autocomp
echo "1" >/sys/power/sr_vdd1_autocomp

in this order. It switches ON some voltage manipulation and in my case it also gives me twice more battery time. But it may be dangerous - it may crash your N900. So - test it, and if it doesn't crash - use it after each reboot. See bug 7633 - https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7633

You also may free one main window from any widget (keep it free) and keep device on it while you don't work with it - it also may save you battery. If you unlock N900 any widget on active screen will start doing something and some of them - communicate via Internet which decrease battery life. Especially if you have a magnetic case - see bug 6689 - https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6689. There is workaround in this case, but read that bug (it is long).