Homebrew Mediaplayers for Wii, is there actually one that works?

[sj44k]

I started playing around with some of the different mediaplayers on the wii last week. Its almost christmas so I will be going to my parents for a while and given that they live in the stone age I thought it would be nice to take my wii and atleast be able to watch a movie or two.

Well, I dont think that is going to happen. So far I tried: Geekbox, Mplayer CE, Mplayer (normal?) and another mplayer port. First thing I noticed is how goddamn unstable they all are. I'm lucky if I have a 50/50 chance of them not crashing on boot.

Lets start with geekbox. Well not much to say other than the navigation is the complete opposite of what would be inutive. I tried some converted files. Performance is terrible. And with terrible I mean files my old pentium 2 could play, my phone does play, work terribly slow. You wont watch a movie like this.

Mplayer (normal?). DVD playback works nice. Takes a bit to load but who cares? Too bad I cant play anything other than dvd with it because it wont see my usb hdd.
Mplayer CE. Well, from what I read this one should be good. Not really. It does detect my hdd but format support is horrible. The site states it supports a whole range of formats but it just doesnt. Dont even bother converting your media to .avi because it will either crash mplayer CE or it wont even display the file on the hdd. The .avi files I did manage to open have no sub support. Mplayer says subs are enabled but doesnt bother showing time. No idea why.

Now I'm rather shocked by this. Basically you can play pretty much nothing. Well, maybe if you spend hours and hours converting everything to a format that will play but that is a lot of work. Also, how come my mobile phone can play more formats and play them better than the mplayer apps on wii? I mean, I can run everything on my touch diamond1 with coreplayer. The only thing that doesnt work is softsubs, for the rest I can toss in every format I want, no converting at all, and it will just play it (and drain your battery in 2 hours).

Now maybe im just doing something terribly wrong. I certainly hope so because if you port something and have it play 1 out of 10 media files if you are lucky than just dont bother releasing something at all.

 

[pepxl]

First off MPlayer CE is the best mediaplayer for the wii to date so these questions need answering before anyone can help you none of which youve mentioned in your rant about not been able to get anything to work.

Do you have cIOS 202 installed on your wii?

Is your HDD partitioned into 2 or more partitions?

Do you have a FAT32 partition and is it the first partition in the table and is it set to active?

What version of MPlayer CE do you have?

What SM do you have?

What cIOS do you have installed?

MPlayer CE can most definitly place .avi's nno problem, ive only just finished watching Heroes EP 11 & 12 using 0.75 and subs do work if youve correctly set them up.

 

[iggloovortex]

Also I've used Mplayer CE multiple times to play DVD's successfully.

The only Gripe is the video quality, but seeing as the wii isnt supposed to play DVD's and if the conditions are going to be as bad as you state, it should be more than enough, it is for me.

 

[Ultralex]

you need cios 202 so that it can read usb 2.0.
Oh and ntfs support is crappy,you need it formatted as fat32.
Use MplayerCE

 

[Am0s]

I use geexbox watched loads of film on it for me its the best player

 

[sj44k]

First off MPlayer CE is the best mediaplayer for the wii to date so these questions need answering before anyone can help you none of which youve mentioned in your rant about not been able to get anything to work.

Do you have cIOS 202 installed on your wii?

Is your HDD partitioned into 2 or more partitions?

Do you have a FAT32 partition and is it the first partition in the table and is it set to active?

What version of MPlayer CE do you have?

What SM do you have?

What cIOS do you have installed?

MPlayer CE can most definitly place .avi's nno problem, ive only just finished watching Heroes EP 11 & 12 using 0.75 and subs do work if youve correctly set them up.

Yes I have.

Got 2 partitions, though no FAT one but I dont see why I should do that as the program states it shouldnt have any problems with a ntfs partition. It displays files on the ntfs partition so that shouldnt be the problem.

I got the latest 076 version.

SM? what kind of softmod I did? I did the one that installs everything at once (though I already had the HBC before that).

Something I just discoverd now, I thought the wii would crash in alot of cases as it kept on saying analyzing stream for quite some time. Now I left it on by accident and noticed it can take minutes (!) to open a file. Once its open you better not touch anything because it seems to crash then. These are just normal .avi files.

I think I got everything I should. To me it just seems to software is balls? I mean there isnt much you can screw up with selection a file to load. Maybe its because I converted files from .mkv? They seem to have more problems than the ones I downloaded in .avi. Than again, once its .avi should it really matter? I'll try some re-encodes at a lower bitrate and try some of my topgear episodes as they all came in .avi.

 

[Ultralex]

Every wii homebrew sucks in opening ntfs partitions ,all runs slow etc.
Put the movies on a Fat32 partition,thats what every homebrew is capable of.
Oh and with SM he meant System Menu.

 

[sj44k]

I think that fixed it. I made a fat32 partition and now things seems to load a lot better indeed. Why dont they put up a warning that ntfs isnt the smartest thing to use if it can cause such big problems?


For what its worth, I got SM3.3E and one of the first wii models (bought day before the launch).

 

[lostdwarf]

For what its worth, I got SM3.3E and one of the first wii models (bought day before the launch).

with your time machine?

 

[mousex]

with your time machine?

He just wrote this so that someone asks how he got it because now he can write what a cool guy he is

 

[tj_cool]

Maybe he bought it the day before release, but only got it at the release date?

Anyway, you won't find anything better than Mplayer_CE. Of course its not perfect at all, but its better than nothing

 

[evandixon]

For what its worth, I got SM3.3E and one of the first wii models (bought day before the launch).

with your time machine?

Perhaps it was leaked, like some games are before their official release date.

 

[lostdwarf]

For what its worth, I got SM3.3E and one of the first wii models (bought day before the launch).

with your time machine?

Perhaps it was leaked, like some games are before their official release date.

ahhh like NSMBW... only with the Wii. bet his website got pwned too lol

 

[lostdwarf]

seriously though, the newsest version of MplayerCE is not bad at all. plays all files off my sd card and usb's no problem. most dvd's work now too.