[Creo]

I have found that the wireless networking built into the Wii is not fast enough to keep up with DVD Mpeg2 video, even with good network signal strength. I found that I have to use wired networking (with a USB-Ethernet adaptor) to get good performance with DVD Video. The wireless networking in the Wii will keep up with a more compressed (lower bitrate) video stream such as Divx/Xvid. Note that the Wii may run into problems and not keep up with modern, highly compressed video such as H264/Mpeg4.

Regards

Peter

[Creo]

The newer Wii’s (post 2009 I think) cannot play DVDs at all. Nintendo removed the ability from the DVD drive mechamism to do anything with any normal DVD’s. This answer is in some FAQ list somewhere.

Peter

[Creo]

Update. I’ve messed around and learned a bit. Have a look at the following post.
http://www.wiimc.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=224&start=10#p6891

Peter

[Creo]

I’m resurrecting an old thread here, but I think this may be the most appropriate place to post about my experiences of getting WiiMc to do what I wanted it to do. Sorry for such a long post, but I hope the knowledge passed on is worth it.

I wish to use my Wii as a video jukebox with a networked disk drive as the filestore to reduce the handling damage to some of the DVDs that the children use regularly. I have waded through the various posts with what
works/doesn’t work and been left confused. Here’s what I’ve learned after spending a lot of time mucking around.

As a minimum I needed the Wii to operate correctly with 720×576 25/50Hz source material (I live in Europe) – it was hard to decide if some of the advice given in the forums was relevant because it was written for a different part of the world. My Wii is one of the newer ones so it does not have any internal support for playing DVDs. I have no wish to have a PC running in the background running VLC Shares (as many people appear to) because it would go
away from the simple system that I wanted to the point that the children could use it (ie turn on network disk drive. Turn on hub/router. Turn on Wii and go.)

I have a 1GB disk drive operating with a Linksys NSLU2 wired network filestore using stock Linksys firmware (There are a number of hacks available for NSLU2 because the firmware used is Linux based). It appears on the network as a SMB share. The NSLU2 can operate with disks formatted differently, however it operates fastest and most reliably using a disk formatted with it’s native E3FS (a linux) file format.

It is important to note that the file extension of a video file name is not a reliable way to work out which of many possible codecs have been used to make the file. To find out what codec has been used you need to try and play the
video file with PC based media player or use a software analayser such as ‘Mediainfo’. Unfortunately WiiMC currently provides no information about any files it is asked to play, so the only way to find out is the hard way!

In the first instance I transcoded a couple of DVDs to H264/AVC/Mpeg 4, part 10 using ‘Handbrake’ (which I’ve used successfully with ipods and hacked satnav’s) to try. This is a modern video file format (it’s the most popular file format used on bluray disks) and will generally reduce a dvd file size to about a third of the original whilst still retaining reasonable quality. The downside of this fromat is that it needs significant processing power to decode and play the video correctly, although this can be mitigated slightly by choosing the correct encoding options. In the first instance, using standard encoding options, the Wii crashed quickly on loading any video. I tried a lower resolution which was successful, but the picture quality was too poor to be watchable for long. I tried different encoding parameters to make the video file easier and quicker to decode (there are options you can set for this purpose) and the Wii performed well for several minutes before it froze. Jumping around the video using the scroll bar would cause the Wii to hang fairly quickly. I eventually gave up on trying to get this video format to work. It may work for you if you choose the encoding and display resolution options carefully.

I next tried H262/Mpeg 2, which is the native format that DVDs use and is now an elderly, not particularly efficient (by today’s standards) video format. It’s quick and easy to combine the relevant .vob files from the dvd and rename the combined file to something sensible. The Wii plays these files well, however the Wii spends a lot of time buffering because the built in wireless networking is simply not fast enough to keep going at the required rate. Improving the wireless signal at the Wii made little difference. I then used a usb to wired network adapter that works with the Wii (plenty of choice on ebay/amazon etc) and this is fast enough to produce DVD quality images with no pauses for buffering. Jumping forwards and backwards through the video worked without failure. Success! :-). The upside of this method is that there is little time spent transcoding video formats and it works well, quickly. The downside is that disk space is not used efficiently and wired networking is required to make it work.

Finally I tried transcoding a couple of DVDs to H263/Mpeg 4, part 2/Divx which sits between the above two standrads in terms of complexity. This is now generally considered an obsolescent standard since the widespread
adoption of H264 based encoding. I had really good results with this. File sizes were about half the DVD file size with no noticeable degradation of picture quality from the DVD original and the Wii was able to play them well without hanging or pausing for buffering. Jumping around the video file using the scroll bar worked well. The inbuilt wireless networking is sufficiently fast so there are no pauses for buffering, provided there is a reasonable signal available. There are a number of different transcoding software packages available online. Most of them are no longer maintained because everybody now wants to use H264. These older software packages for transcoding video to H263 are relatively slow because they do not make the best use of modern 64 bit operating systems and cpus. The transcoding software I used is called ‘AVI.Net’ and can be readily found by your favourite serch engine. This software will allow batch processing, so large numbers of DVDs can be transcoded with no manual intervention after setup. I’ve settled on this format and the children and I are now happy that it all works. The Wii was underused, but it now has a purpose in its life and is now earning its place by the telly.

Hope this helps and someone learns.

Regards,

Peter

[Creo]

The official Wii lan adaptor is now hard to find. I recently bought a ‘compatible’ one and it works well. Networking from a file server is much faster and much more reliable. The official Wii lan adapter uses a specific but readily available usb/lan bridge chip inside. All the compatible ones use the same chip so that the Wii doesn’t notice the difference and performance should be similar.

Peter

[Creo]

I had some difficulties in getting an SMB share to work. Normally I use a Windows system, but Windows hides and simplifies too much. Use a Linux system (or boot a windows system off a ‘Linux Live’ CD such as Ubuntu) to mess around until you find the magic combination that works – it will be quicker than doing it with the Wii.

The networked disk drive in my case in a NSLU2 with stock firmware. My problems were caused by a space in the share name that I’d missed and incorrectly set user/group permissions. Once I had that sussed the Wii connected and was able to do what I expected it to do.

Peter

[Author]

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