I appreciate the credit for the “pause trick” but this is the first I have heard of it and I’d like to know more. Can anyone post a shortcut to the original post reporting this “trick'”?

PS: I also think you are refering to file sharing using SMB, where the WIIMC is reading directly from the shared directory on the PC. Streaming is where the PC sends an http stream to the network and WIIMC is able to connect to and play that stream using its OnLineMedia mode.

My question is does this hangup playing a long movie only occur when using SMB or does it also occur when playing the same movie from a locally attached USB drive. The former would indicate a network problem and the latter a WIIMC/MPlayer corruption problem.

Think of the buffer in the Wii like a swimming pool.
The stream of video is the stream of water filling up the pool, the process of playing the video is an outflow of information emptying the pool. If the pool isn’t being filled quickly enough it will empty and the outflow will stop. When you pause the video you are switching off the outflow to let the pool fill up again.

Films with higher bitrates and resolutions need a big pool, because a lot of water (info) needs to flow out more quickly. Higher resolutions have other implications too, ie the graphics card cant actually process all that info quickly enough.

The Wii has a pretty small pool (in comparison with a PS3, xbox 360, most decent PCs, etc) so we need to fill it faster. That is why ther LAN adapter is always preferable for both SMB and net streaming, it is way faster than Wifi and with less overheads and free from other issues such as interference and signal strength. This counts for the wii and any other computer or attached storage.

You can also check the filesize of the film: an hour and a half long move at 1.5GB will have a much higher bitrate than the same movie at 700MB in size, and so the Wii might struggle with it a bit.

Actually I find my usb lan adapter buffers slower than wifi.

But yes, the difference is like night and day in the sense that I’ve never ever had a crash on the usb lan adapter. Not even once.

So I’m not so sure (using your metaphor) that the pool is empty, it seems more like the “scoop” is breaking 😉

I appreciate the buffering info above.

It would be useful to know what WIIMC does if it runs out of info in the buffer. WIIMC issues a “Loading” message which I’m guessing is while it waits for the buffer to load the amount specified in Settings, then one may get a White overlay “Buffering xx% message” which again I’m guessing means WIIMC ran out of buffer and again is loading the amout dictated by Settings. If my guesses are correct I think the best strategy is to set the buffer to 100% which may take longer to “load” but should reduce the requirement to “buffer”.

When you click on a video, you see the Loading… message. At this time MPlayer is loading and looking for a codec that can play the video. Then, the video will start playing. Immediately it’s detected the buffer is low, so you see “Buffering…” message. This attempts to buffer the % of the cache (12 MB) that you’ve set in the settings. Default is 30% so that’d be 3.6 MB of the video. Once that’s full, the video starts playing. From there, buffering is happening while you’re watching. If the buffer runs low (eg: < 4%), the video is paused and "Buffering…" is displayed. The cache is filled back up to 30%, and once that's reached, the video is unpaused.

If I do something like unplug my USB LAN adapter or shut off my server, the cache keeps attempting to refill itself, and the video is played until the cache runs out. When this happens, you’re booted back to the WiiMC main menu, and your files are listed.

So what’s happening then to cause a crash? If I knew exactly I’d probably be able to fix it. But perhaps somehow some “bad” (unexpected?) data is coming through SMB (only on wifi?). This data is put in the cache, which then MPlayer doesn’t know how to process, and it crashes. Just a theory.

Well, I don’t buy the bad data theory because the transport needs to be reliable given SMB was developed and is used in a business context. If a packet doesn’t check it will be resent so what you get is what was in the original file.

Investigation however shows that SMB is a block protocol rather than a streaming one and subject to a lot of overhead in sending data across the LAN. See http://blogs.technet.com/b/neilcar/archive/2004/10/26/247903.aspx for a fairly simple explanation… so bottom line, make sure you are not P2Ping or creating other LAN traffic at the same time, and make sure your wireless is operating at its rated speed. The Windows Task Manager on W7 shows my current link speed, which varies by my distance from my router. Right now its 24Mbps, can drop to 18 or go up to 36. But I used to get 54Mbps so I need to follow some of the tips at http://www.astahost.com/info.php/Improve-Wireless-Speed_t12885.html I don’t know the speed of the WII wireless adapter. Apparently there have been some speed improvements to it as well.

I will try and do more testing of this, in particular local USB vs SMB to the same USB drive on my PC. I’m not convinced yet that there is any particular SMB problem but time will tell.