1 My Fire plays .mp4 videos off the Web, as tested with my ancient iPod encodes and things that I purchased from BOST and Crunchy. However, I was not successful trying to upload movies. MP3s work, but not movies.

2

MP4 is a container, of course. I tried an MP4 file, and it got about 2 seconds in before giving up with an error. But that MP4 file contained modern audio and video codecs, and that's probably why.

I imagine it probably works fine with MPEG2 and MP3 audio, but who wants to use that?

3 I don't have a "Gallery" tab. Just Newsstand, Books, Music, Video, Docs, Apps, Web.

4  It's one of the applications under the "Apps" tab.

5 Thanks, that works. Watching my raws of Mouretsu Pirates now. They make Kindle run quite how, I should say. Also, I see no way to make screencaps... Well, unless I install a screencap app.

6 Can a video player like VLC be put on the Kindle?

7

Hard to say. It is running a variant form of Android, and the dual-processor is a Texas Instruments OMAP.

There is a mechanism for downloading and installing applications. But the app would have to be rewritten for that execution environment, and I am sure that VLC has not been. I would be very surprised if it ever happens.

8

There is a version of VLC for Android in beta, but I don't know how useful it will be even when finished (as decoding any high quality video in software is probably not going to work out great on a mobile device; and if it uses the processor's hardware acceleration, then I think the performance will be identical to the built-in player). And obviously it's not on Amazon's app store yet.

I tried to find a list of codecs that the OMAP4430 accelerates and found this buried in a PDF (the Technical Reference Manual for the OMAP4430), but I don't know what most of it means:

The IVA-HD supports resolutions up to 1080 p/i with full performance of 30 fps (or 60 fields). The IVA-HD
subsystem supports the following codec standards natively; that is, all functions of standards are
accelerated (without any intervention of the digital signal processor [DSP]):
• H.264: BP/MP/HP Encode and Decode
• H.264: Fast Profile/RCDO Encode and Decode
• MPEG-4: SP/ASP Encode/Decode (No support for GMC)
• DivX 5.x and higher Encode/Decode (No lower version; for example, 3.11 and 4.x)
• H.263: Profile 0 and 3 for Decode, Profile 0 for Encode
• Sorenson Spark: V0 and V1 Decode (No encode support)
• MPEG-2 SP/MP Encode/Decode
• MPEG-1 Encode/Decode
• VC-1/WMV9/RTV : SP/MP/AP Encode and Decode
• On2®VP6/VP7 Decode
• RealVideo®8/9/10 Decode
• AVS 1.0 Encode and Decode
• JPEG (also MJPEG) Baseline Encode/Decode
• H.264 Annex G (SVC) Scalable Baseline Profile to 480p – 720p30
• H.264 Annex H (MVC) up to 720p30

9 I have a Motorala Xoom, recently upgraded to Ice Cream Sandwich, the latest version of Android.  It won't play most fansubs out of the box.  I installed a few video players from the market, and got the ability to play a few more video types, but it still wouldn't play any of my fansubs.  A few groups are putting out specific tablet/phone/mobile subs, and those will play.  Otherwise, you have to either transcode them to something that will play, or use a transcoding streamer.  I found that most transcoding solutions made the subtitles pretty hard to read.