Is Wii DVD playback multi-region?

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  • February 7, 2013 at 2:44 pm #24183
    gary_w
    Participant

    Forgive me for what is probably a dumb newbie question, but I’ve googled around and not really found a clear answer.

    Basically, I have a Japanese Wii and I have a mix of dvds from the USA, UK and Japan. My Japanese DVD player will only play the Japanese ones, and getting a multi-region dvd player here is a pain in the butt. Since I already have a Wii I was wondering if it was worth hacking it to see if it would play dvds. Or if it would be a waste of time/energy.
    (i’m aware not all Wiis will play dvd movies, but apparently mine has a 50% chance of being able to).

    AFAIK: Japan and the UK are both dvd region 2. But the UK uses PAL and the USA (region 1) and Japan both use ntsc. So it’s not only a case of dvd region, but also video format.

    I’m assuming a Japanese Wii outputs in NTSC, but can it be changed to output PAL? Or convert from PAL to NTSC on the fly. (i’m guessing not powerful enough for that).

    Alternatively, if i rip all the dvds to a usb drive, would that work? Or would the pal/ntsc thing cause issues?

    Thanks for any advice!

    March 29, 2013 at 3:15 am #30612
    macuquinho
    Participant

    I believe it is multi-region. The Wii itself does not have hardware to run DVD (the decoder chip, which limits the region of the DVD). As everything is left to the WiiMC (or rather, mplayer), the program includes a software decoder (wich is region free).

    But i’m not sure about the NTSC / PAL issue. If you use a component video cable (the one with 3 outputs video and 2 audio), the color system of the DVD will not matter. The problem is when using a composite video. I don’t know if mplayer respects the Wii default output (converting the color system of the videos to the correct output), or if it outputs the video color system (and resulting in a black and white image…).

    I have an european Wii and can watch PAL (european) and NTSC (american) DVD videos, using component cables, on the correct color.

    If you rip your DVDs, will be even better, protecting the DVD drive on wii (because you wil run videos from USB or SMB) and solving the NTSC/PAL problem.

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