IOS58 vs IOS61

[Anonymous]

The IOS58 required by the new forwarder for wiimc 1.1 is really fast!! So fast that My Passport Essential WD (500G), after few seconds of play fails miserably 🙁

Probably is a power issue when using USB2.0 with this disk without external power. So I recompiled a version of wiimc loading the old good IOS61 and things work fine (and slow) again. I think It could be useful to have this option in the next official release of wiimc.

Btw, a 500G Maxtor with external power supply works great with IOS58

[LoTeK]

Tantric has answered this here:
http://www.wiimc.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=861

have a search round the forum before starting a topic 😉

[Anonymous]

I know Tantric already answers to the possilibility of choosing between IOS58 and IOS202 and I agree with him because both these IOS support USB2.0.
The point here is that if one can select between IOS58 and 61, also disks working as USB1.0 only can be used.

[aka107]

Try this beta and commet:
http://www.wiimc.org/files/wiimc_beta2.zip

[Anonymous]

I did some test with the beta2 update supplied by Rodries (many thanks for that).

I tested the following WIIMC versions:
1) 1.1.0 (IOS58)
2) beta 2 (IOS58)
3) svn r622 patched and compiled for loading IOS61

I performed the tests on two video files:
A) VOB file with a data rate of ~750KBytes/sec
B) AVI file with a data rate of ~240KBytes/sec

The HDD is a Western Digital My Passport Essential 2.5″ 500GB. It is powered directly from the USB port. See http://wiki.gbatemp.net/wiki/USB_Devices_Compatibility_List for comments on compatibility with WII homebrews.

Both WIIMC v1.1.0 and beta2 fail on the VOB file after some minutes, stop playing without error or exiting with the opening error message box. The error time ranges from 20sec to 5min. In some cases, WIIMC exited with an exception.
On the AVI file thinks are slightly better: in this case the time between errors is around 10min-20min. For both AVI and VOB cases, seek, ff and rewind are problematic (hangs, opening error).

The WIIMC version running on IOS61 has no the issues mentioned before. However the HDD data speed is not enough for playing VOB files, causing frequent “buffering” pauses. In the past I tried to increase the mplayer buffer size for alleviating the problem, but I was not able to eliminate it completely.

Loading the same video files on a 500G Maxtor HDD with external power, both WIIMC v1.1 and beta2 work perfectly.

My conclusions (about My Passport Essential):
– The increase of the data rate seems to increase the failure rate
– Seeking with IOS58 is problematic
– IOS61 seems to solve the failure issue but the speed is too slow for playing high data rate streams (e.g. vob files)
– I’d like to test a dual usb power cable to exclude power issues.

Any further comments or suggestions are welcome!

[Floricienta]

I’m using a 2.5” 300Gb Western Digital inside a generic USB enclosure and no external power… the enclosure came with a dual-USB cable but it’s currently connected just to one of the two ports on the back of my Wii (launch model) and it works fine with beta2+ios58…. I haven’t tried a VOB file, but so far I’ve tried OGM, VKV, MP4, AVI with and without subtitles, RMVB and DVD playback (that one was a little slow to load at first, but once it started, there were no hiccups).

When I installed IOS58 for the WiiMC Channel there were some problems (Neogamma stopped working, some WiiWare WADs resetted the system instead of running, and WiiMC froze after 10 minutes of playback as described above, with no error messages) but out of curiosity I used dopmii to reinstall the system menu (I installed System Menu 4.0, same version I was using before, but it updates into using IOS58) and now WiiMC works without problems and everything else was fixed.

So all those problems were due to the system menu not being properly updated when I installed IOS58 manually, and it just needed a refresh.

Try and see if that solves anything.

[Anonymous]

Many thanks for the advice.

My wii has the ios58 installed using the Tantric’s ios58 Installer with a 4.2 System Menu. I reinstalled the HomeBrew channel using the HackMii v0.8 to enable the ios58 in homebrew apps too, but I didn’t update the System Menu. I can try to re-install it as suggested.

[rodries]

Reinstalling, upgrading, or downgrading the System Menu will make absolutely no difference.

[Anonymous]

I saw in the last commit that both ios58 and ios61 will be supported by wiimc.
It would be nice to have a configuration parameter for choosing which one to load at startup. This could increase the usb device compatibility allowing, in practice, to choose between USB 1 and 2.

[rodries]

Not going to happen.

What’s actually happening is the opposite – not more being supported, but less. Right now WiiMC runs on whatever IOS is loaded – eg: IOS28, and doesn’t complain. This can lead to unpredictable results.

So now if some strange IOS is being used, it’ll show a warning to the user.

[Anonymous]

I agree with the idea of having a IOS “white-list”.

However, if an IOS is in the list, why not have the possibility of choosing it from WiiMC configuration?
Since I installed the WiiMC forwarder, both HBC and WiiMC work with IOS58. For choosing a diffent one I have to start HBC, run wiixplorer, choose the IOS, reboot wiixplorer, browse WiiMC, launch it… a shortcut whould be appreciated!

From the coding point of view, the only difficulty I can see is the need of starting WiiMC and read the configuration before the loading of the selected IOS.

[aka107]

@clava wrote:

I agree with the idea of having a IOS “white-list”.

However, if an IOS is in the list, why not have the possibility of choosing it from WiiMC configuration?
Since I installed the WiiMC forwarder, both HBC and WiiMC work with IOS58. For choosing a diffent one I have to start HBC, run wiixplorer, choose the IOS, reboot wiixplorer, browse WiiMC, launch it… a shortcut whould be appreciated!

From the coding point of view, the only difficulty I can see is the need of starting WiiMC and read the configuration before the loading of the selected IOS.

We can’t do an iosreload because we have moved bss to mem2 and mem2 is used in iosreload.
To fix that problem I have to change linker script to move libogc static vars to a special section in mem1
I think is too much work to allow iosreload, the best way is change hbc or channel to do iosreload before launch wiimc, or make a little loader to do an iosreload then load&launch wiimc, like a forwarder

[Anonymous]

Thanks rodries for the the comprehensive technical explanation. I agree that the game’s not worth the candle.
Perhaps, if this feature was considered useful, it would be more easy to change the wiimc forwarder to read the settings, do the iosreload and lauch wiimc, as you suggested.

[rodries]

This really shouldn’t be useful. IOS58 should be the better choice, always.

Part of the reason for this is that we test on IOS58 and only IOS58, if you’re running on any other IOS, you’re taking your chances.

As far as USB compatibility, it makes more sense to iron out the wrinkles in using IOS58’s USB module as a solution there. However, generally speaking the compatibility should be higher with IOS58 than with any other IOS.

[Anonymous]

Convinced! For me, you can close this thread.

[Author]

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