I recently acquired a very-good-condition N770 for $41, including shipping. It came with an older version of 2006.
I tested it out, and after realizing that A, the video player wouldn't play anything I tried(FLV videos from Youtube of several sorts), and B, the browser was not all that great, I then upgraded to 2007HE.
Now, after messing with -that-, I have to say I like the Minimo browser better then the older opera-based one, although the video player would -still- not play FLVs. I installed a number of things, although I couldn't get Mplayer to do much with these same FLVs.
Now, at this point I found my torx screwdriver set, promptly disassembled my N770, and did a SDHC-mod on the RSMMC slot. I now have an 8GB SDHC card, with the case removed, mounted inside my N770, and an unusable RSMMC slot.
I then looked about for a version of the Fanoush kernel which would support my new card, but dispite Fanoush's page saying that there is one availaible for 2007HE, I could only find them for 2006.
So I grabbed that, installed the latest version of 2006, and the Fanoush kernel... and it worked! My SDHC card was seen, and I could access files.
Which brings me to yesterday. I took my newly-installed n770, and installed a bunch of software on it, including Mplayer, flash 9 and Minimo(or trying to, anyway).

Which brings me to my main problems:
1. Minimo does not work at all. When I open the webbrowser, under the 'hidden' sub-menu, I see Mozilla, Opera and Webcore, Mozilla is selected. Changing the "change now" value simply results in a crash, and looking up the user-agent of my browser shows me to actually be running Opera.

2. Under Opera, Flash 9 runs slowly, and has no sound. The slow part is understandable, but the lack of sound is a problem. I;d be content with EITHER getting sound running in opera, or having it run in Minimo. I'm not picky.

3. Mplayer works very poorly in some cases:
h264 = "unsupported video codec"
avc1 @ 352X264, -nozoom with mp4a audio = Smooth video for about one second, then the video freezes. Audio plays fine. Pressing "menu" brings up the menu with a single different frame, but the menu is frozen and won't respond.
avc1 @640X360, -nozoom with mp4a audio = Black screen with good audio. Pressing pause brings up the menu, with a single frame behind it(whatever -should- have been there), and the app freezes same as before.

In a few cases, it seems to work fine:
mpg1, 224X176, 44KB/sec = perfect(to be expected, intended for a Rockboxed H320 with a lot less power, so...)
flv1, 320X240, -nozoom with mp3 audio = works fine!

Is there anything I can do to improve performance, or at least make it -display- the frames its decoding?

3. If upgrading to OS2007 will fix either of the above problems(I assume it might help with #1 at least, because of the default Minimo browser which worked the last time I used it), where can I find a Fanoush kernel for it?


Thanks,

-Robbie

Hi Robbie,

Sounds like you are already finding the limits of the old 770.

1. I had a 770 and after trying every browser on 2007 I always settled back on Opera. 2008HE is a bit of fun to get going but was stable enough for me to use (although I seem to remember having audio problems). 2008HE would give you access to Tear (among others) which is a webkit based browser which should be pretty efficient on a 770. 2008HE would also give you access to a much larger range of s/w.

2. Flash also runs slowly on the N8x0 as well. In my view it is not worth using flash other than to annoy iphone users.

3. The hardware is still a limiting factor on playing videos. My recommendation would be to transcode videos to something like mpeg1 and play with the resolutions.

I do miss the solid cover on the 770 but I don't miss all the other weirdness such as the clock losing time, stability woes and lack of memory. I was running this kernel kernel-sdhc-48MHz-3.2006.49.tar.gz from fanoush (http://fanoush.wz.cz/maemo/) with a 2GB Kingston with great stability. Moving to an N810 gives a huge speed increase as well as a welcome stability improvement.

Cheers,
John

Well, Opera may be fine for most things, but last I tried, I couldn't get onto my bank's website "use a supported browser"; I tried changing the useragent, but I couldn't make it work.
Minimo I -know- works; I was able to use it when I was on 2007HE.

2008HE may be possible, but isn't it slower and more resource-heavy than 2006 or 2007?
Also, no matter what I do, I have to make sure it works with my SDHC card - but aside from Gregale/2006 working with Fanoush's kernel, and 2007HE -not- working out-of-the-box when I tried it, I don't know much about SDHC support other than that.

Yea, thats fair enough. Really, I was just hoping to be able to play slow flash-games that will work slowly, and hopefully animation-type flash files one-at-a time on a blank page to reduce resources. It -seems- like I can do this already, but only in "low" quality mode, although I have no sound(big problem for this).

Fair enough; at least I know its not my setup in particular causing it.

Yea, I'm using the same kernel, and it seems to work fine. I had a bit of a scare today, when the OS suddenly stopped reading from the memory card and it wouldn't auto-mount(corrupt or damaged card), but a restart fixed that problem.

Surprisingly, I haven't had any OS crashes, just program crashes - Mainly the web-browser.

And, yea, I know I could/should have gotten a newer model, but eh - It more-or-less does what I want, and the price couldn't be beat($41 shipped!)

-Robbie

Disregard most of the above:
When googling, I ran across a post explaining that the kernel is the same between the latest os2006, 2007HE and 2008HE, so the same Fanoush kernel will work.

I just installed 2007HE, and the Fanoush kernel - It seems to work fine.

However, the maemo.org repositories disappeared(404 error) about 10 minutes after I installed it. They seem to be back now though, so we shall see what happens.

This might also interest you as an avenue to a lot more interesting s/w.
talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=13925
I have easy debian installed on my n810 and it is great.
If you do go down the 2008HE path I would highly recommend keeping a bootable version of 2007HE around as well as, if my memory serves me correctly, 2007HE was much more stable for day to day use.

$41 ... bargain

-J

Agree, and with normal sound!

bun