I'm looking at getting the N810 (from Dynamism) and while I'm going to use it primarily to browse the internet, I will also be using it extensively as a video player.

I'm currently using an old, but powerful, Dell Axim X30H with a 624 MHz XScale CPU. I've encoded most of my TV recordings and DVDs at the "typical" Internet format, 640x360 XviD with B-frames, 25fps at approx 1000kbps with 128kbps MP3. The X30 is able to play back these files perfectly using TCPMP.

Can the N810 with Mplayer (or any other playback software) play these files? I certainly not going to re-encode all my videos... this is the main reason why I didn't bother getting the iPod Touch.

Although I'm impressed by how well it can keep up with those vids, since you are coming from more powerful pmp you might not appreciate the occasional/frequent hitching during high motion scenes. I'd say 70% of the time it appears full speed, 15% of time drop frames, 15% completely frozen vid... the audio always seems to stay true though.

I frequently play videos encoded in those (internet xvid) resolutions, usually 350mb for tv shows and 700mb for movies and they play pretty well enough for me although they hitch as mentioned during high motion.

What software do you use to encode (efficiently) at those resolutions? My attempts to reencode to those resolutions using agk left me with much larger files than internet sources.

Couple of things.

More than likely, if you want to pay less that a grand for a device, you may have to re encode. Why you say you "certainly" wouldn't do so doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Find an encoder with drop folders and come back in a few days. (I do encoding for a living for ABC News, so I love any chance to encode, finding the smallest file size with the highest quality - of course with the 18 encoding nodes we have between our two farms, I could likely do your entire collection in the format of your choice in an hour or so, so perhaps I am not feeling your pain).

Why don't you post a link to one of your shorter videos and one of us can download it and test it for you to let you know about playback across a number of the media players? I can also take your existing xvid and convert it into a couple of test encodes using lower bitrates. At the very least, it will identify if you can transcode instead of re encode. Depends on how many B frames per I frame. MPEGs are always the worst to transcode, in my experience.

Two farms and 18 encoding nodes... Why hello there dubiousmike, friend, chum, life-long buddy, etc

We are mostly made up of Anystream with a smattering of Telestream. Plus at the times we do Cable VOD, Cox likes one while Comcast likes the other...

That's -- wrong (I wanted to write another word there, but decided to try politeness for a change). My Pepper Pad3 plays just about any Divx/Xvid video file without transcoding and it certainly doesn't cost a grand in whatever money you've got.

350mb for a tv show is insane waste of precious memory space..

Where? On my hard drive? Or on the memory card of my Itablet?

Is your point that 350megs for 45minutes is waste or that its tv show? And is that a waste on desktop as well?

Why compromise quality, i've got 24gigs to work with on that device and tv shows are just temporary.

The only waste is that n800 can't keep up and drops frames sometimes... but that 350megs seems pretty standard 'internet' size.

To clarify, I was speaking more in terms of pushing the bitrate he mentioned through a portable device.

I don't know, so I'll ask, does the Pepper Pad play an xvid file at 1128 kbps and at the resolution he mentioned without chugging? If so, I'm happy to say I am wrong. But I suspected that his bitrate was too high for most devices that will play xvid files. Thus the need for transcoding.