Homebrew Video Distortion in MPlayer CE

[Elliander]

I noticed a strange distortion band on the right side of the screen when playing some videos in MPlayer CE. It happens with a variety of file types both wide screen and not. I am using a 36" HDTV. I'm just curious as to what the cause can be and how to fix it.

 

[Fishaman P]

Cause? MPlayer CE.
Fix? WiiMC.

 

[Elliander]

I actually found a common theme: When the video resolution is higher than 480 (which is the maximum that the Wii is able to display) those video files will play with a distortion band on the right side.

Thanks. I will give WiiMc a try.

 

[Elliander]

I can confirm that WiiMC does not have the same video distortion issue. It has allot of really nice features too. I like how it tells you if your Wii cannot play DVDs. Unfortunately, it looks like the youtube playback feature is bugged. Attempting to use it results in a memory dump.

Edit: Ewwww... It's not just the youtube videos. There are a whole mess of videos that crash the Wii to even attempt to play! Most work OK, but this player cannot play some videos that MPlayer CE can play flawlessly :'(

Edit 2: Ok, so it only crashes the Wii if I try watching a video after it already has crashed from trying the youtube feature. As long as I turn it off a while after and watch something else first it seems to work.

Edit 3: After the first few minutes there were no further crashes with any video or even the youtube feature (though I think the youtube feature could be improved with an option for higher quality depending on bandwidth) so it seems that really it just needed a good restart after install. It's much better than MPlayer CE. Thanks!

 

[JoostinOnline]

WiiMC is nice, but ever since it dropped 202 support it has been awful at playing videos. If you don't have 202[60]v5.1 rodries mod, I suggest you install it. That won't help you with videos over 480p since MPlayerCE can't play them, but I'm pretty sure that WiiMC just lowers the quality on 720p videos. I can't say for sure, WiiMC rarely detects my HD (it did before the 202 drop), and when it does, it still can't play 720p videos.

The latest verison of WiiMC has also been very unstable. These days I don't use it for much besides internet radio, but it crashes about 75% of the time when I select a radio station for the first time.

 

[Elliander]

WiiMC is nice, but ever since it dropped 202 support it has been awful at playing videos. If you don't have 202[60]v5.1 rodries mod, I suggest you install it. That won't help you with videos over 480p since MPlayerCE can't play them, but I'm pretty sure that WiiMC just lowers the quality on 720p videos. I can't say for sure, WiiMC rarely detects my HD (it did before the 202 drop), and when it does, it still can't play 720p videos.

It would be impossible for any media player on the Wii to play videos at higher than 480p because that's the highest resolution that Component Cables are capable of. It's a physical limitation of the Wii that could only be circumvented if someone makes a hardmod to give the Wii and HDMI cable which is itself unlikely. So obviously the key difference in this area is that WiiMC is just better at decreasing the video quality than MPlayer CE.

The latest verison of WiiMC has also been very unstable. These days I don't use it for much besides internet radio, but it crashes about 75% of the time when I select a radio station for the first time.

Ahh. So it's not just me. I see. Thanks for letting me know. Well, I do hope they eventually fix it. Any idea how fast they update? Or if maybe you know the latest "safe" version number and what it can do?

 

[JoostinOnline]

WiiMC is nice, but ever since it dropped 202 support it has been awful at playing videos. If you don't have 202[60]v5.1 rodries mod, I suggest you install it. That won't help you with videos over 480p since MPlayerCE can't play them, but I'm pretty sure that WiiMC just lowers the quality on 720p videos. I can't say for sure, WiiMC rarely detects my HD (it did before the 202 drop), and when it does, it still can't play 720p videos.

It would be impossible for any media player on the Wii to play videos at higher than 480p because that's the highest resolution that Component Cables are capable of. It's a physical limitation of the Wii that could only be circumvented if someone makes a hardmod to give the Wii and HDMI cable which is itself unlikely.

The latest verison of WiiMC has also been very unstable. These days I don't use it for much besides internet radio, but it crashes about 75% of the time when I select a radio station for the first time.

Ahh. So it's not just me. I see. Thanks for letting me know. Well, I do hope they eventually fix it. Any idea how fast they update? Or if maybe you know the latest "safe" version number and what it can do?

It varies. Sometimes they are months apart, sometimes a week.

v1.1.8 worked well for me, especially the 202 beta. I only updated because I got sick of the update prompts. I made a custom channel for it, which you will need to install. You will also want the cIOS I mentioned above:
http://www.hacksden.com/showthread.php/1413-WiiMC-with-202-support!

It still won't run as well as MPlayer CE since it's not designed for 202, but it's better than sticking with 58.

 

[tueidj]

It would be impossible for any media player on the Wii to play videos at higher than 480p because that's the highest resolution that Component Cables are capable of.

That's not true - component cables can go up to 1080i (common max for TV out on PC video cards), possibly higher. The wii is limited by its external framebuffer (and to a lesser extent, its video encoder), which has a maximum size of 720x576.

 

[Elliander]

It would be impossible for any media player on the Wii to play videos at higher than 480p because that's the highest resolution that Component Cables are capable of.

That's not true - component cables can go up to 1080i (common max for TV out on PC video cards), possibly higher. The wii is limited by its external framebuffer (and to a lesser extent, its video encoder), which has a maximum size of 720x576.

I see. Thanks for the correction. I was under the impression that this was a physical limitation with the cables... and speaking of frame buffer, could that be why WiiMC has such random crashes? Sometimes it works perfectly and other times nothing works at all. Maybe it allocates too much to a buffer?

 

[Elliander]

WiiMC has many more errors than I initially thought. It has a nice GUI, and the youtube feature is a nice touch, but videos whose quality exceeds 480p regardless of length will have the audio cut out completely 9 times out of 10 after a few minutes and at any point if I skip back or forward the audio will come back, but it will be badly out of synch with the video. Since the synch gets worse over time I can't use the setting to intentionally delay video. I also still get frequent crashes.

Does anyone have any idea of which specific version was the latest stable release? This feels like a Beta release.

 

[JanosValentine]

While a few years late answering this, I've recently encountered the same issue and found a solution. For most videos, you can just load it in Windows Movie Maker (it's free) then under Save Movie click custom settings and set it to 640x480, then save the movie as a shrunk down MP4 with pretty much the same level of quality. At least, my eyes can't tell the difference.