The inclusion of a large, super sharp, colour screen is one of the most appealing aspects of the Nokia N810. So appealing in fact, that I am inclined to suggest that the N810 has the potential to put not only cheap portable DVD players to shame, but many of the Archos and Apple devices too.

The ‘out of box’ video playback of the original N800 was woeful. Fortunately, although not yet perfect, the video playback experience of the N810 is much improved. As demonstrated in the video above, I was able to encode top quality video at a decent bit rate and get it to play smoothly without the need for any extra software. For the record I used Handbrake on the Mac to encode the video at 480 pixels wide, using the XVID codec wrapped in an MP4 container. The file was about 1000 kbps.

This leads me to think that the Nokia N810 (or N800 with OS2008) might make a fine portable video playback device. It may not be for those who have no experience with video encoding, but if you are familiar with some of the more popular Mac and PC ripping and transcoding applications, you might consider the Nokia N810 as a decent alternative to an Arhcos or iPod.

The open source community have also provided quite a number of video playback solutions, some of which I may feature in a future post.

Check out these other Nokia N810 articles...

Day 1. An Introduction Video.

Day 2. Quick Brown Fox or Lazy Dog? The N810 Keyboard.

Day 3. Stomping All Over Portable DVD Players!

Day 4. Nokia’s Bill Plummer Explains...