N900 does DIVX and XVID (AVI)

Hi,

It's been a while since I got down to write something.

I've taken a break from doing video since now most of the stuff I watch can be viewed using a web browser. No need to down.load, transcode, upload, etc. I just need a hotspot and my laptop or device and I can watch movies, tv shows, you name it. Also the quality of some of the videos posted has increased greatly. I was watching an old TV series, I have all 170 (or so) episodes in a hard drive but I found a place where I can watch them all streaming, so now I don't copy them or carry them, I just connect and watch.

Now if only the battery life would be 10-15 hours of video streaming or something like that, I would be really happy indeed.

Anyways, I got a chance to play around with an N900, many good things about the device, but after using S60 and the iPhone, the N900 was a bit weird to use, specially the phone. But there are some good news.

The N900 comes with very good AVI support right out of the box!

AVI streaming (like from Megavideo) doesn't work well with the N900 (it's painfully slow), but local playback is superb. I managed to play very good quality (over VGA) videos with no apparent slowdown.

The video controls are extremely limited and touchy, and the screen aspect ratio is not the best to watch video but overall a step in the right direction.

I didn't get to play enough with the N900 to really put it through it's paces regarding video, I did find some problems playing H264 videos converted for the N96 format, and I didn't check if it supported Main Profile, if I have another go I'll try to verify this.

One good thing is that people are developing new stuff for the N900 all the time so you don't have to rely on official releases to fix or expand functionality, just keep checking the Maemo repository or other Maemo sources.