So I've been playing around enormously with different solutions for turning the Wii into a media centre, and thought I'd share what have become my ideal settings for video playback through the Wii. I'm using Tversity, which out of the 3 main solutions (Orb, Tversity and Weezo) is the only one I've managed to get a great solution for, so you'll need to download it
here if you don't already have it.
1) reduce the size of the flash embedded player to 90% (see instructions from user ncarigon
here.)
2) if you're on a good broadband connection with a decent machine, here are the transcoder settings:
tick: decrease the bitrate if it is too high for my network
Video resolution: 400 x 300
Optimise for Quality
Connection speed: medium
Compression: minimum
Tick: Decode the media without taking into account it's bitrate.
Now these settings, after having reduced the flash player size to 90% will let you watch any TV show perfectly pretty much every time (just hit Zoom on your Wiimote once for fullscreen) However, the Opera browser runs into a memory issue once you've got about 1hr into any video stream, meaning that you're just getting into a movie and then bam, it freezes. There's no way around this directly, especially since there's no way to seek within files using Tversity on the Wii. The solution however is simple, and requires only a tiny bit of manual intervention. Here's what you need:
1)
Download Virtualdub if you don't already have it
2) drop the video file into Virtualdub and go to the "video" dropdown and set to "direct stream copy"
3) go to the audio dropdown and select "direct stream copy"
4) Select the start of the video using the first red circled tool in the image above (screengrabs above)
5) navigate to 1hr in and select the second red circled tool
6) save to AVI
7) repeat the process, using the last end point as the start point and the end of the movie as the next end point
The above process takes < 1m as you're not compressing any of the streams. If you have a three hour movie just repeat the process so you have three files.
At least for me, on an X64 vista dual core 1.87GHz machine with 2GB Ram, this solution works perfectly every time, rendering really great flash transcoding with no choppiness on the Wii. Hope this is helpful!
Incidentally, I found that the
Weezo software was actually *far* superior to Tversity in terms of both UI and transcoding results, but they currently have a massive issue where any video stream freezes 5 minutes into the file. I've raised this on their forum and the developer is currently looking into whether his flash player is at fault.
