Which is the optimal player, video codec, resolution, bitrate, to reproduce video on Smartop?

I have had some luck with mplayer and vlc. But without a working XVideo extension you have to play around with the settings to make it watchable and stick to lower res video.

I do know that the xv driver is being worked on though (there are threads about it here on powerdeveloper) and when that is released you should be able to use mplayer or vlc to watch up to 720p video (at least in theory)

without the xv extension I was able to watch some really old MST3K .avi files using mplayer -ao openal -vo x11 -autosync 30 -framedrop

If you want to get slightly less performance but make the video cover the screen you would likely want to use -vo sdl instead of x11 and -fs as well.

That is with 480 x 360 video mind you.

Someone might ask why I'm using openal as the audio option
and the answer is that I tried all available audio outs on mplayer and openal seems to take up the least amount of CPU.

in some cases video playback seems slower to me with -ao pulse. although I just tried it now on that MST3K video and it seems to work fine on my smartbook.

I haven't done much with vlc (at least without the xv extension) so i can't tell you much about how to tweak it I hope this is useful for you. (but it probably isnt unless you want to re-encode a more modern high res video into a lower res one for the smartbook. I'm not exactly sure the max res you could use with this method but would be fun to find out. )

I'm not with my Smartbook now, but it would be useful to try out mplayer's -benchmark option coupled with -vo null and -ao null. That would let us know at least the maximum capability of the CPU and the codecs. Hw accelerated video output shouldn't be significantly slower when it finally becomes available.

Right now I've been able to play PAL resolution xvid DVD rips with some framedrop and without fullscreen. A lot of time is lost in the yuv->rgb conversion, so with the overlay it should be a piece of cake. 720p H.264 is probably out of the question with software decoding - but then again, there's the special piece of silicon that is supposed to do exactly that.

I'm waiting for updated SW...