N810 not available until December?

According to gbuergisser, Nokia Europe have told him: "the N810 will not be available for a few weeks (December for sure) in Europe."

This fits with the NokiaUSA.com date of 2007-12-19. As zerojay's said, we're getting stuff cheap so shouldn't complain (too much), but it is frustrating. Users are getting N810s from retailers in the US, but no-one on the device programme have been able to get one yet. This is frustrating to end-users as they've got no software, and it's frustrating to the lucky 500 watching people get them before them and then moaning there's no software.

Fortunately Quim Gil's recognised this, but we're still pretty much in the dark on actual dates and why it's been delayed in some markets from the original mid-November date.

Nokia launch Internet Tablet Video Converter

Nokia have launched the Internet Tablet Video Converter which is, by far and away (IMHO), the single best video converter for Windows for owners of the Nokia Internet Tablets.

Interface

The interface is powered by Mozilla, and is a smart, black GUI looking vaguely reminiscent of the Hildon desktop:

From here, videos can be dragged and dropped on to the window; or added explicitly by clicking on the "Add" button. There are also buttons in the top-right (corresponding to the status bar on a Maemo device) for an about box and to bring up the settings.

Interestingly, the far-left hand side contains the button "Video", suggesting that future versions may handle DVDs or other media sources. There's no sign of that in the app, yet, though.

Converting a video

Videos are converted into MP4 files (rather than all the other media converters which target DivX/Xvid). This is only of technical interest, as the user experience remains the same.

Multiple videos can be converted simultaneously, with the total progress and time remaining, and each video's progress and ETA shown in the interface:

Once converted videos can be copied one at a time, or many together to a connected tablet through the interface; as well as deleted etc. Converted videos are kept over a number of instances, but a maximum number of videos can be specified which, once reached, will result in the oldest converted videos being deleted.

Settings

The settings button brings up a simple UI, from where the quality of the converted videos can be set on a slider; and more advanced settings like where the converted videos should be stored:

As with my own tablet-encode it uses a preset-based system with options ranging from "low" to "best".

In summary...

For Windows users (who don't want a scriptable program such as tablet-encode), this is definitely the best media converter available.

mediaserv + tablet-encode = mediautils

My command-line video conversion script, 770-encode is very widely used; however its name is obviously something of an anachronism. So with the imminent availability of the N810, it was time to rename it. Welcome, tablet-encode. This new name also comes with a major new version, including a number of long-standing patches from people being applied, such as multiple-file support.

I've also put it, along with mediaserv in a new garage.maemo.org project: mediautils.

Finally, mediaserv has gotten a v0.05 release which fixes a number of small bugs (thanks to all those who reported them) and makes it aware of both tablet-encode and 770-encode as potential encoders it can use.

More information, and links to the Garage downloads can be found at: http://mediautils.garage.maemo.org/