After my rail trip earlier this week where I had free, but so slow as to be unusable, WiFi I resolved to load some media onto my N810 to help pass the time on future journeys. Early experiments showed that the N810 can play the average xvid avi downloaded from your favourite torrent site. However it didn't necessarily play them well. Firstly, you need to install mplayer which gets better performance out of the hardware than the stock media player. Then, so long as the scene isn't high-motion you can watch your tv show, or movie, or whatever. To get good performance though really needs a re-encode, especially to play media downloaded from iplayer (maybe via my
earlier technique for timeshifting British TV) which is unwatchable.
The best solution that I have found is
tablet-encode which provides mencoder profiles for the N810 and is command-line based so is ripe for scripting. Usage is simple, as all good software should be:
tablet-encode
tablet-encode --help
tablet-encode --preset list
tablet-encode input.avi output.avi
tablet-encode --list file1.avi file2.avi file3.avi
tablet-encode --preset best input.avi output.avi
tablet-encode dvd: film.avi
tablet-encode --preset best dvd://1 dvd://2 dvd://3 media/
tablet-encode --gui input.avi output.avi
Tablet-encode can be
downloaded from
Maemo.org.
