DVD hack with SMB for alternative to wii’s w/ no dvd support

[calhaus]

I have a black wii which means no dvd support in any way.

Which suffers me since I have a huge dvd collection I can’t watch on my wii. Saying that I recently played with SMB share and I’m able to use my computers dvd over local area. But the only problem is WiiMC doesn’t handle .vob .ts files as it usually processes ISO files. I can open the original dvd I put on my laptop but I can’t seem to click the titles or menu’s at all and stuck on the root menu.

Is there anyway you guys can edit the proper handle for the files in a DVD (vob, ts idk which one to changle the handle) like ISO’s. I and probably many black wii users would be much appreciated.

Thanks for the great work! And such an amazing job!

[rodries]

Not as simple as it sounds. The dvd menus require dvdnav which has it’s own internal caching. Which doesn’t work so well over SMB. So that’s why I disabled it. I would suggest you rip your dvds to divx.

[calhaus]

Thanks for the rapid reply! Then I guess I’ll have to stick with ripping them.

[p.xoni]

Use an external usb DVD drive, instead of the built-in Wii one.

It’s not a perfect solution as I find it chugs and pixilates sometimes when watching a DVD, but you could try attaching a portable usb dvd drive to your Wii. It works! And I have watched DVD’s in WiiMC using my portable usb DVD drive. I find though, once you get the DVD playing, don’t stop it, that seems to hang the player and then your sunk.

Note, the Menu items within the DVD player icon just don’t seem to work on all DVD’s but many higher quality DVD’s work perfectly. When this happens you get the DVD front cover display screen, you just don’t seem to be able to do anything with it. If I have a bad/poor quality DVD, instead I go to Videos / usb / and play VTS_01_2.VOB . It’s a sucky solution, but seems to work adequately sometimes. When the DVD won’t play from the DVD icon, I usually get major pixilization and the DVD movie is totally unwatchable. A lot of DVD through work just fine.

Maybe Tantric can do something to clean this up, but yeh using a portable usb DVD drive does seem to work.

The model I use is MSI model #DSE-8AS-A , there are TWO usb connections as it needs extra power, so you are going to need to unplug your usb harddrive.

I have tried MPlayerCE and it’s DVD button will only try to mount a DVD inside the Wii DVD drive (not the usb emulated DVD drive that WiiMC seems to read ok). When trying to play the VOB file directly via Open / File / Wii USB Mplayerce asks for a File System to use. And of none of them work unfortunately (fat32,ntfs,ext2).

MPlayerTT seems to just not run and kicks up back to HBC.

Note, Homebrew Browser seems to exception/crash if run while the dual usb plug usb DVD drive is plugged in.
Same for WiiXplorer. Unsure why?

Seems WiiMC is our only hope and it work pretty good, Tantric are there any ideas you have here on better DVD compatibility? The DVD’s that I run into problems with are unfortunately mostly my kids cartoon dvd’s, which is unfortunate as I am trying to train my kids to play there archived DVDs 🙂 I do nothing but more recent downloaded/smb videos.

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