I can't get my N810 to play any h264 video with much higher than a video bit rate of 450Kbps. Is your 600Kbps a combined video + audio bit rate?

Have you turn off many settings in order to achieve the fast decoing speed? Mind you, if you turn off everything, you are getting Divx/Mpeg4ASP quality video, which is what the Nokia ITVC does anyway)

Another point, if you generate a h264 file with an average bit rate of 600Kbps, without any constraint on max bit rate, the video bitrate will peak well over 1000Kbps (with variable bitrate encoding). This type of bit rate is going to choke the Nokia N8x0 to death. If you are setting a constant bitrate of 600Kbps, then you are producing unneccessary large file size, you could have the same video at variable bitrate at half of the size and the same quality.

Download this http://rapidshare.com/files/101387677/No.mp4.html
and see how it plays on your n8x0. It's 600kbps.H264/96kbps44.1kstereoAAC that plays fine on my n800 (assuming nothing significant runs on it at the same time).

I'm using Visual Hub - see the screen dump below. The playback shows occasional glitches mostly on key frames when too many of them are too close to each other I believe (your peak rates I assume), but that doesn't bother me, good tradeoff quality, size vs occasional glitches. Note this is a 3rd generation copy so the quality is a tiny bit lower than usual.

As you can see in the attachment I have access to low level codec options but other than experimenting one day with anamorphic encoding I'm way too lazy to play with them.

In a way of explanation, I'm fooling with video on n800 despite the fact that UI and PC integration on iPods is far far superior simply because I find watching any video on iPod classic screen almost unacceptable - screen size issue.

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Note added later - Here is another video for those wanting to test their video converting skills. http://rapidshare.com/files/101608397/Like_a_boy.mp4 See if you can convert it properly w/o losing too much in quality - the video (1st generation which shows) plays fine on n800 as is but glitches are evident. In any event this is one of the best music videos I've seen in recent times. Enjoy.

Since the tools mentioned in this thread are for Win/Mac and I didn't find a easy to use tool for linux I wrote a short script for converting any (mplayer playable) video-source to h264/aac mp4 for the tablet. Have a look here: http://seiichiro0185.xen-host.de/dok...00:mp4encoding (and thanks dchao for the codec settings)

I tried using ffmpegx to convert some anime to psp h.264 format (in the selection). It works well with mplayer but not the built-in player. Doesn't work in canola2 either.

I tried to encode h.264 before I read this thread; to do this, I changed video encoding options in an old script I had used for the 770, so basically the resulting file was an *.avi with h.264 video and MP3 audio. Plays well on the desktop.

Diablo's built-in media player says "file format not supported".

Reading here now that MP3+h.264 is problematic - what do you think (or know ): Do I get this error because I used MP3 audio? (Even though it's avi, so we're not talking about a true mp4 container?) Or would you rather assume there's something else wrong? Any information about this? (Isn't it a shame we have to gather information about what plays and what doesn't this way?)

OK, just to share my wisdom: After some more experiments I ditched AVI, wrote a new script that encodes the video into an *.mp4 container and found that
a) you need to use the nocabac option in your encoder
b) you could - theoretically - use b-frames, but the playback quality at least in the built-in player is absolutely miserable then (it doesn't keep a constant speed.... gets sloooow and fast and sloooow and fast ...), so you better set number of b-frames to 0.
c) i use a video bitrate of 300, 352x208@25fps and an audio bitrate of 64 (aac) ATM. I think I could even reduce the bitrate, the quality is perfect for me.

tools: mencoder for encoding, mp4creator for muxing rsw .aac/.h264-files into an mp4.

EDIT: Works fine in built-in player, that is. MPlayer stutters like hell and uses much more CPU, even if I go further down with audio and video br.

I use mencoder and wondered how to translate this to -x264encopts on the command line. Recently I found a Finnish site that deals with encoding for the N95. Among the comments was something I could copy&paste, so now my (working) mencoder setup is:

Plays very nicely on both the built in player and mplayer. Doesn't stress CPU a lot.

I used to have this before:
Note that this does not include nomixed_refs (this seems to be important) and the partitions are different. I have no idea what all this is, but while the file size is almost exactly the same in both variants, the one I use now needs much less CPU power when decoding. (Scenes that used to consume ~70-75% CPU now play at ~45-50%.)