You will get worse quality by re-encoding, not better.
If you mean that a video with a native resolution of 800 by 480 pixels is inferior to a video with a native resolution 1280 x 720, then yes, I agree with you, but only when you display them at their native resolution. If you're trying to say that squashing a 720p video down into an 800x480 screen in real-time is more effective than taking your time and re-encoding it using a system that gives you fine control over the bitrate (such as handbrake), I can't see how that could possibly be true.
And size of video doesn't matter that much with device with has 32-64 GB internal storage and support 3 TB external storages
Lugging around external hard drives kind of negates the whole purpose of having a portable media player, doesn't it? I'd much prefer to squeeze more data onto my micro SD cards than be forced to juggle little hard drives around.
The problem is that the N900 uses the OpenMax IL standard to interface with the OMAP3430's DSP. The OpenMax IL standard only allows one to control and connect "components" ( eg. video codecs ) in the manner that Gstreamer does that run on top of the DSP hardware -- it does not allow the user to interface with the DSP directly. If you want CPU agnostic portable access to DSP functions then the DSP vendor needs to implement the OpenMax DL or "Development Layer." Unfortunately, TI, in the interest of maintaining a stranglehold on companies that are paying big bucks for TI's DSP development tools and NDA licenses for access to said software and hardware, has locked down direct access to their DSPs. The only full Implementation of the OpenMax DL standard that I know for ARM is software based.
Are you trying this? Are there any advantage in performance and how install this libraries?
There would be no speed advantage; in fact there would be a major hit to performance as these these libraries are software based. Also, one would have to rewrite all the codecs that used to run on the DSP, but there are already implementations of software based A/V codecs that are optimised for ARM's SIMD media instruction set, namely NEON. The main open source implementation is the ARM port of FFmpeg ( now known as Libav ) .
The libraries I mentioned just make implementing such software codecs easier.
Here is betaversion of PanPlayer, player for Pandora console, which has similiar hw like N900 and running Linux. http://dl.openhandhelds.org/cgi-bin/...,0,0,0,114,329
This player uses partly DSP, whis is the same like at N900. It is able play videos with higher resolutions then 840x480 (yes, Pandora has the same).
So.. can this be answer? Is it possible port to N900?
