Video encoding on N900 to achieve maximum quality

Yesterday I've tested my N900 tv-out with 50-inch plasma display. Most of the videos on my phone are about 700x304 or so, which is perfect enough for viewing on the phone or even on 21-inch TV. But on 50-inch it reveals the bad quality of image, so I've decided to reencode some of the videos to 800x480 to achieve the maximum quality. Of course, my requirement was smooth playback on the device.

After testing many scripts and tools (like Arista Transcoder, which has preset for N900, but produces glitching sound), I finally came up with crossplatform Handbrake tool, which is listed in Maemo Video Encoding wiki page. The default Baseline3.0 preset from wiki didn't work for me, so I came up with own one:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9311656/N900.plist



It's fast, produces great quality and default video player on N900 plays produced videos easily. The HD videos from youtube converted at about 160fps on my Core Duo laptop. The 480 FLV videos from youtube also took seconds to convert (I guess, it even doesn't require full reencoding).
The video playback quality on 50-inch display is much much better now and from 4 meters I can't even tell for sure whether it's 720p or not.

Feel free to post here tested mencoder options or other presets for n900 maximum quality reencoding.

Maemo packages download statistics

I've always wondered whether there is a possibility to check Maemo5(Fremantle) packages downloads statistics.And there is - you simply open the URL http://maemo.org/download-stats2/index.php?os=Maemo5&unixname=PACKAGE, where the package is the package unixname. For example, conky: http://maemo.org/download-stats2/index.php?os=Maemo5&unixname=conky
You'll get nice downloads graph:

Nice enough.

Ubuntu Lucid and cyrillic in wine and Picasa in ru_UA locale

In Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) the cyrillic input do not work in ru_UA locale. Actually, the locale is ru_UA.utf8, but wine/Picasa works correctly only with ru_UA.UTF-8 (uppercase and with '-'). The problem is in missing alias in file /usr/share/X11/locale/locale.alias

Here is an open bug for this: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libx11/+bug/601308

N900 Ctrl-Space bug workaround for Russian keyboards.

So, I'm a lucky user of Nokia N900 mini-computer, and I often use English and Cyrillic letters. I have an "classic" English hardware keyboard(with 4 arrow buttons, not 2) on N900, with both English and Russian letters. My N900 running (latest at this moment) PR1.2.

But there is an unpleasent bug(#2501) exists, which doesn't allow to use hardware keyboard with russian letters - the Ctrl-Space layout switch doesn't change layout(but shows the notification, that layout was successfully changed). The problem, as far as I understood is that default 'English' keyboard is 4-mode only and doesn't support other modes, so layouts are changed but the same settins for modes 1-4 are used.

The 'Russian' keyboard is 8-mode and layouts switching by Ctrl-Space does work correctly. The only(big) minus is that this is incorrect layout - many symbols are on the different buttons and it hasjust 2 arrows key.

So, the quickiest and simplies workaround of this bug I found in switching to Russian layout and modify it manually to be as close as possible to the default English layout.

And it works.

I assume that you have the same N900 with English/Russian keyboard(English is primary) and PR1.2 (Maemo 5 10.2010.19-1.203.1) and hardware layout "Russian" is choosen.

All we need is to change the only file(needs root):

/usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/nokia_vndr/rx-51 .

Please, backup it somewhere, cause errors in this file may cause the system boot failure.

Here is my original rx-51: (link, md5sum) - please, check if you have the same file. If not, do all changes manually at your own risk, with undrstanding what you are doing.

And here is the modified: (link, diff)

Simply replace old rx-51 file with a new one and run command 'setxkbmap ru'.

Everything should work now. I also added Home. End. Page Up, Page Down commands for Fn+Left,Right,Up,Down respectively.

Feel free to ask questions.

Links:

Maemo Bugs: Bug #2501: https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2501

Maemo Wiki: Keyboard Remapping: http://wiki.maemo.org/Remapping_keyboard