Nokia N800 Tablet PDA

Nokia Linux Handheld

The Nokia N800 Internet Tablet is a powerful Linux handheld computer capable of playing transcoded movies and TV shows on its beautiful 4.1" 800x480 screen. It has a stand and speakers for two people to watch at once, or you can plug in headphones. You can shrink a one hour program into 180 - 250 meg and it looks great. About 4 hours of content will fit on a 2 gig SD card, and the N800 holds two cards. It also fits in my jacket pocket.

The purpose of this HOWTO is to lead you toward setting up MythTV to automatcially transcode and copy programs overnight to an SD card so you can watch on the plane, train or bus. I see people watching videos on their ipods and laptops on the train, but the N800 is a lot lighter than a laptop, has a larger and nicer screen than the Ipod. Because it's Linux, open source developers are porting current apps and writing new ones.

Get Latest Image from Nokia

You need to have the latest image from Nokia to have a stable media player. You can use the Windows software provided to install the image or follow these easy Linux instructions:

http://maemo.org/maemowiki/HOWTO_FlashLatestNokiaImageWithLinux?highlight=%28CategoryFlashing%29

Manually Transcoding

Manually, you can use mencoder to transcode the files. This command does a little cropping so that the entire screen is filled with the show, and the bitrate produces a very small file but is still very clear for watching.

mencoder -oac mp3lame -lameopts abr:br=64 -af volnorm -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:dark_mask=0.15:autoaspect:vbitrate=512:trell=yes:v4mv=yes:vpass=1 -vf crop=720:402:0:20,scale=400:240 -idx -ffourcc DIVX -ofps 29.97 -o /videos/pda/crop_0_20.avi /myth/2028_20070429190000.mpg

I record all my SD shows at 720x480. Using this scale and crop I lose a little of the bottom and top but the video plays full screen on the N800 and still looks fantastic.

Test other Options

Media Converter is a very helpful cross platform graphical Java program you can run to play with preset and adjustable mencoder settings. It has preset for the N800, but also you can control video and audio bit rate and more with sliders and buttons. It will handle a batch of conversions at once, and there is an option produce 30 second clips only -- so you can quickly view different settings and compare them.

https://garage.maemo.org/frs/?group_id=26

I pulled most of the mencoder command line out of the logging output of this program. It has an install for windows and jar and shell script for Linux. There is also a MAC OS X version.

This page has all the info you need to know about video encoding for the N800, including links to other programs, scripts and transcode, mencocder and ffmpeg commands:

http://maemo.org/maemowiki/VideoEncoding

Making it run in Batch

There is already a great PDA script contribution for MythTV, and a few mods will make it work for you N800.