Hello everyone great site,

I recently bought an Archos 30GB WIFI as I just wanted a decent xvid/mp3 player that I can surf the web with at home and out and about. Unfortunatly I was dissapointed with the poor screen resolution of 480x272 which made some browsing difficult and decided to return it after seeing the N800.
Hopefully I have done the right thing.
Im sure the web surfing experience will be much better and I am not concerned about storage as Im sure a SDHC fix will be shortly available however I am concerned about video playback especially xvid files.
I was under the impression I would be able to play back avi files at full resolution 800x480 is that not so, why not?
I already have many xvids converted for PSP and Archos in 480x272 will they play without convertion?
Also does it handle jpegs and pdf files well? ie as a photo viewer or ebook reader.
Sorry for the long post. It really does seem to have the potential of what I want, espeially love the video VOIP skype thing planned, but is it a media player??

cheers

You have the same needs I have, and I have both the Archos and the N800. For multimedia, the Archos is great, because (with plug-ins) it plays almost any video and does it well. It's browser is not so great.

The N800 provides a good browser experience, particularly because it is flash enabled and high resolution. I also like the stereo speakers, which have no bass but do provide a nice stereo effect and nice (undistorted sound). The Archos speaker is for making beeps. So for audio, the N800 is great, and it does audio streaming really well (internet radio, etc.)

But, the N800 is absolutely horrible at playing videos. 1. It requires a limited set of specific codecs with the included media player. 2 The colors are muddy and 3. It cannot play 30-frame-rate video with any resolution greater than about 320x240, and I am not sure it can do that. It cannot without skipping frames (jerky movements) even play the sample video that comes on the device. Go to a store and play that video and see. xvids or videos for the PSP and certainly vids at 400x272 will not play.

People claim that video perfomance will be enhanced by firmware tweaks. We will see. But please note that the Archos has a dedicated hardware chip for decoding video. The N800 does not (although there is a claim for a co-processor on the chip - the media player does not use it). There is supposed to be an installable third-party media player (mplayer) that does better. But it is unclear from the discussions whether or not the thing works on the N800 and exactly what it plays. I would settle for divx or xvid at 640x480 or even 420x272 at 30 fps with 128kbs stereo, but I see no evidence that the N800 can do this. Forget 800x480 videos, in two senses - you do not need that resolution on a 4-inch screen for video and the N800 will never play that. The 400x272 resolution of the Archos is perfect for video, less than good for web.

N800 video is a disaster. Looks like we need two devices to satisfy video and internet needs unless there are big upgrade to the Nokia or mplayer is developed further. Video was also lousy on the 770, and the new processor is not that much more powerful for video. So in a year there has beeno no advance from Nokia on the video side, except adding a low-resolution video camera (which does the job though).

I agree, with one caveat: Video on my 770 was actually on a par with my Archos PMA430, but the Archos had more storage capacity.

Now that I have a shiny new N800 with a pimp-*** processor and 8 freakin' gigabytes of storage, I find that it plays video worse than the PMA! Fsck that!

The N800 CPU is significantly more capable than that in the 770, also the N800 CPU contains dedicated video decoding hardware but unfortunately Nokia have not seen fit to support it in the kernel.

Basically, the N800 could match, even exceed, the capabilities of the Archos if Nokia gave their backing, but as Nokia market the device primarily as an Internet Tablet and not a media player this is unlikely, but I hold out some hope that they will do the necessary to make it a killer media device.

Yeah. Hope...

Thanks all for the input.
I kinda figured the video would be a let down but I am trying to think positive that this will be resolved either by Nokia or by the community. At least the hardware seems capable.
Therefore what is the best I can hope for in regard to encoding my video into a best quality playable format at present.
Overall though i think it beats the archos hence mine is being returned.

cheers

I've had good results with video encoded at 400x240 25fps 96kbit audio, using Media Converter (from the Garage). It skips a bit, I'm sure that would be resolved by either reducing the bit rate or with future firmware optimisations (video isn't my main use case, so haven't played with it that much).

mplayer is the community media player and is coming along nicely, but unless Nokia provide access to the hardware acceleration I doubt even mplayer will be able to make use of it.

What is the bit-rate for the video? What is the sampling rate for the audio - 44.1? 48? 32? The specs are incomplete. And skipping "a bit" does not sound very inspiring, not to mention the lower-fi audio.

Some of the other threads seem to provide some more positive actual results, with an actual downlaodable example that purports to play well.