Hi! I have previously owned a PMP (Personal Media Player) that I enjoyed a lot for playing music and watching videos, although the PMP broke down this summer. For a while I've been looking around for a replacement, but haven't really found a PMP that seems good enough in the right price range.

I got really interested in the Archos 605, for both PMP functionality and Wifi web browsing, but it seems like the web browsing on the 605 is more of a gimmick than a real use. And, the 605 is quite pricey, the screen doesnt seem that good, etc.

Then I came to think about the N800 and realized that it has dropped in price... A lot. I got really interested in it, because it really seems (in theory, at least) like a great allround machine, and I'm not afraid of third party software and a bit of tinkering (allbeit not too much).

So far, my impressions are that the N800 is a great Internet Tablet, with a great screen and that it functions just fine as a music (MP3) player.

The video playing I'm a bit unsure of, though.

How good at video playing does the N800 get with the best available third party software? I would prefer to be able to play "regular" .avi-files in DivX/Xvid and other common codecs. Preferably with standard TV/DVD-rip resolution, up to 720x576 or something like that. For short - I'm not interested in having to Transcode videos. How well does this work on the N800? Is it likely that the N800 will, in the near future, get much improvement in this area through better third party software?

If I buy an N800 I will probably not strike until after christmas.

Very grateful for your thoughts on this. Thanks in advance!

Cheers.

The N800 gets -very- good with the latest software and a few freely available downloads such as the brilliant n800 media converter. I use mine every day on the subway watching recorded TV-shows and listening to music and for longer trips, a movie or two is a real treat. At first I was a bit irritated that I had to re-encode everything for it to play nice with the n800, but you get into the habit of doing that real quick. If you don't want to transcode, then of course it's not very good at all. I had some limited success using ORB to transcode on the fly, but the picture quality really suffered.

Picture quality with reencoded material is excellent, sound quality perfectly adequate with good pair of headphones, and the built-in speakers are good enough that I've watched the occasional episode of House even without headphones.

The only issue I have is the battery-time, I have to be pretty careful to charge it at least once a day, sometimes twice.

Thanks for your reply!

I just have this "condition" that I don't want to have to do transcoding... :/

But is there any hope that better software is released for the N800, allowing it to play videos without transcoding? I mean - is it "theoretically" powerful enough?

Are there any third party software "projects" for video playing on the N800 in the works that we can look forward to?

Using third party software like gmplayer allows you to play a lot more media without reenconding. It depends what you normally encode at.

Sorry to be this blunt, but don't even bother with the N800 as a PMP, it falls miserably short. Like you stated, you don't want to have to transcode all your DivX/XviD files and i agree with you.

I personally have over 250gb's of DivX/XviD files that i play on my Archos AV500 and Treo 700Wx. it seems that one would have to recode everything to 320x240 just for the benefit of the N800, which is a chore.

One thing though, at least on OS 2008 my N800 could handle DivX files but it was choppy and laggy and not worth the trouble. I personally don't regard the N800 as a video device anyway as it's never worked well at being one.

I only wish that maybe the VLC folks (or even the TCPMP folks) might have an interest in the N800. I'll bet they wouldn't suffer for donations from folks here.

Just my opinion.

For those of your with large media collections and decently powered computers. Check out aflegg's excellent on-demand on-the-fly transcoding solution: mediautils saves the trouble of re-encoding and gives you beautiful looking, perfect playing media every time. With a decent upstream, you can also set this up to send you media while on the road.

Personally, if you're willing to invest just a little time to prepare things for the N800, it makes an absolutely fantastic media playback device.

It's called "mplayer" and it works great.

Don't be worried about the bluntness - I just want to know if there is any hope

You seem to understand my situation. Even though there might be great transcoding tools, I just don't see that as an option. I want to be able to plug in my device and transfer any video of my choice from my collection without having to plan in advance. It might sound picky, but worked perfectly fine (most of the time) with my "old" PMP. I understand that PMP's have dedicated chipsets for video-decoding, though, which I guess the N800 doesn't have?

What I'm still curious of is if you think the N800 actually has enough power so that it _should_ be able to function as a PMP, or if its just not possible. Imagine if Nokia really put their minds to it. Could they develop a really good media player for the N800 (making it perform as a PMP)?

GeneralAntilles - specify how great mplayer works, please?

Of the .avi files I have copied (un-transcoded) to my N800 and viewed with Mplayer, I have had good results. Maybe I have been lucky but .avi (DivX/XviD) files play well so long as I open them with Mplayer only. The other players can't do what Mplayer does on my N800.

I have taken .wmv files and they are poor, but the utility I found called Media_Converter_Windows_1.43 recoded problem files so they play just fine on my N800. I know you said you don't want to transcode (I didn't want to either) but that utility makes it a snap. It has a small foot print, the interface is very intuitive, it is fast, and it remembers the last settings I used and uses them the next time.

I read a tutorial written ( or published ) by Nokia specifically addressing how to optimize video for smooth / clear playback on the Internet Tablets. I'm sure you can find it with Google. Reading that wasn't necessary but it was worthwhile for me.

I obtain .avi files that are randomly obtained from various places, and tossing them on a SD card and in my N800 (without prior optimization) results in good playback (with Mplayer) most of the time. But as I have stated, maybe I've been lucky.

The rest of the N800's functionality more than make up for it's quirks in the video playback dept. in my view. Your mileage may vary. Regards.

The issue, unfortunately, is a complicated one. The LCD controller is (primarily) what limits us from the high-quality frame-decoding that the rest hardware might be able to hand. The OMAP core actually has both an IVA video decoder and a PowerVR OpenGL chip which could prove useful for the purpose of video decoding (mostly the IVA), but, by negligence or by necessity (possibly relating to the LCD controller), we do not have drivers for them from Nokia.

So, could the N800 get better in the future? My guess is yes (though there may be limits that I am unaware of or under-accounting for, Serge is much better qualified than anybody else on these boards to comment), Nokia could certainly surprise with drivers in a future update (as seems likely from whispers around the water-cooler). How soon that will be (if ever ), who can say?

Personally, I would wait for the next device in the NIT lineup (probably the N900; and probably not much further away than mid-summer 2008, though, I have no hard facts here other than inference from previous release trends) which will almost certainly feature an OMAP 3000-series core and be capable of playing back much larger and higher-quality video files.

Based on the hardware and software available right now, it works about as well as is humanly possible.