Playing VOB-Files from SMB Share

[Anonymous]

Hi@all

I like the program but I have a couple of problems with the video playout over network (via SMB). All of my movies are stored in the original VOB-format at a NAS system. If I play this movies with WiiMC the loading of the files needs very long and drops extremly frames. I’m also getting everytime the “Buffering …” message. If I connect the hard drive directly to the Wii (via USB) everything is okay. But the WLAN should not the issue because I can show the movies on my notebook without problems. The playing from MP3’s and Youtube movies works also fine. Have anybody an idea what the problem is ? I use the version 1.1.1 from the 12/16/2010.

thx
Mario

[Matoking]

Well I would have to say you are prolly hitting a network bottleneck (the wii can only do 802.11b). This is extremely slow and with the overhead that SMB has, you prolly won’t get that working. You could try using FTP instead, but I have a feeling the results will only be marginally better.

[Anonymous]

I fear that boondoklife is right 🙁
I did some empirical tests for measuring the data xfer rate of the WII connection over my WiFi net. Using wiixplorer, both SMB and FTP reached ~4Mbit/s of data rate. The same connection works at 16Mbit/s among 2 PCs, therefore it looks like the bottleneck is on the WII. Typically, data rate for DVD movies range from 3 Mbit/s to 9.5 Mbit/s. So palying DVD in WiiMC over a WiFi (with the current network driver) is at least frustrating!

[Matoking]

This is really just a result of Nintendo trying to put the device out as cheap as possible. I am not knocking it as it does what it is meant to do and it does it VERY well.

I have been wondering lately if USB2.0 is possible, then is it possible to use a 100mbps or a 1000mbps usb ethernet adapter. This would allow for a much faster transfer rate on the network than 802.11b. Then again it may just eat up the processor and end up with a different undesired result.

[rodries]

I’m already seeing far improved performance out of my USB LAN adapter when WiiMC switched to IOS58 and a tweak was made to libogc’s USB 2.0 code for LAN adapters.

Regardless, DVD VOBs play fine for me on both Wifi and hard-wired, with just a little bit of buffering at the start.

[Matoking]

What do you get speed wise on your wired connection? Mine seems to top out around 4mbps.

[Anonymous]

Hi,

sorry for my bad english but I believe there is a mistake of you. In my opinion the Wii have a 802.11b/g chipset and my console is also connected via g to the WLAN router (is running in g-only mode). I will try to make a throughput test with wiixplorer. I have captured the video traffic on my network. Including the ethernet overhead a typical video i consuming approx. 9-10Mbit/s bandwidth in the peak. This bandwidth should be possible without problems for a 802.11g connection. Is the wlan driver an API von Nintendo or is this self written software from Homebrew ? Is WiiMC is using this WLAN driver or have the software his own ? I think 4Mbit/s is very slow for a SMB connection. Is this a limitation from WiiMC, the SMB implementation, Wii CPU or anything else ?

Thanks for your help.

[Matoking]

This is from Nintendo’s site:

What type of router (a, b, g, or N) is compatible with Nintendo WFC?
Nintendo WFC is compatible with 802.11b. Because 802.11g and 802.11n routers are also compatible with 802.11b, these routers will work as well, as long as the router’s settings are not set to “g only” or “n only”.

I know in my case I have 2 routers that if I mark as G-Only the wii will not connect to them.

I get this speed only with the wii, and it is in any application. I can even use the speedtest.net site in the browser on the wii and get that same speed, in my case I use a USB LAN adapter so I don’t have to slow my routers down to b speed.

I would love to know what some of the other users here are getting with their connections.

[Anonymous]

That’s strange. I have definitely a 802.11g connection to my AVM router. What for a browser do you use on your Wii ?

[Matoking]

@supermario333333 wrote:

That’s strange. I have definitely a 802.11g connection to my AVM router. What for a browser do you use on your Wii ?

Opera

[cadbusca]

@supermario333333 wrote:

What for a browser do you use on your Wii ?

This is a strange question….. is there another one besides Opera? And what does it have to do with wifi speed?

[Anonymous]

Sorry, but I have never used a browser on my Wii and therefore the question. I would make also a troughput test to speedtest.net to compare my results.

And once again – sorry for my bad english. Maybe there was the wrong gramma/word !!!

[Anonymous]

I can confirm the test results from clava. I have also only 4,2 Mbit/s over my WLAN and that’s the reason for the dropouts at the video playback. But now I must come back to my question. Is this bottleneck a limitation from the Nintendo WLAN driver, from Homebrew, from WiiMC or anything else ?

@Tantris Do you have really the needed 10MBit/s over your WLAN ?

Thanks@all !

[Anonymous]

Hi@all
I did some more testing on the speed of the Wii’s WiFi, writing a small application based on a devkitPro examples. I used the same network initialization code of WiiMC.
The application reads 80MBytes from a file over a smb connection and compute the elapsed time, without doing anything else.
The time needed to read 80Mbytes is 95sec in my test, so the data xfer rate is around 6.7Mbps, better than the speed measured through wiixplorer but still not enough for playing dvd without frequent buffering.
A tried to play a dozen of dvd as iso over smb, and the buffering rate is around 20-30 sec, depending on the compression level of the iso.
Having a recent wii with the new D3-2 drive 🙁 , I usually play dvds with WiiMC, convering them to iso and storing the iso on a memory key… better than nothing… 😉

[Author]

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