internet radio and music can be minimized but video can't. is this by design?

What do you mean minimize? You mean play a video and then switch to another window? There's no way to do it with only the screen but you can use the window switching shortcut (ctrl+backspace key). Though it'll pause the video automatically.

yes that's what i mean. why does the video pause and the music doesn't? surely there is plenty of free resources left to run other stuff.

No idea *shrugs*. I guess it's similar to bounce in which when you switch it, there's no point in it having focus so it's coded to just pause. The game bounce will also auto pause when you switch it away when it doesn't have active focus.

I guess one could test with mplayer or VLC once they arrive.

I, too, find this behavior annoying. I'd like to be able to pop out of the video player and actually read what the new incoming SMS, IM, or email is, for example, while the audio from the file continues playing. The media player on the n810 didn't auto-pause when you switched away from it. (Although it did apparently still attempt to decode the video in the background, which was just a waste of CPU...)

I find this annoying as well.

I think it was done this way because the playback routines are using an overlay, and would not be sized/displayed correctly in the dashboard.

It may have also been done to prevent multiple apps/instances from accessing the DSP simultaneously, which would likely break horribly.

It would be cool if at least audio would continue while reading an email etc...

guyz since ur talking about videos... i want to convert video using VLC... can u tell me the best setup/setting... so it will look the best on n900... thanks...

Things will crash if two application try to use the DSP at the same time. Pausing the video avoids the possibility of such stuff. I've seen video playback crash horribly while video thumbnails were generated in the background.

give 'camkeyd' from the extra repository a try, it uses the camera button to get to the taskswitcher when half pressed. works very well for me ... since i also like to look up notifications while watching video podcasts for example.

I also agree that this would be a nice feature. In at least one of the promo videos for N900 (the one with the tiny hands/large screen), a video is shown running as a thumbnail in the task switcher, so I can imagine some people being disappointed that you cannot do that with the default media player on the actual device.

I think this should be in Brainstorm as an enhancement request.

Please start a new thread (or search for an existing one about converting video).