Wii as a media extender

[kibbee]

I got a Wii and was looking into using it as a way to use it as a media extender for all the stuff I have on SageTV. I've found a couple packages that let you browse to a website and play .flv files on your Wii that are locate on your computer. However, I've found that these applications crash after about 20-30 minutes, and the video just freezes. There's no way to ff or rw to get back to where you were.

Now I've decided to set up something for myself. I've found a couple other flash components that are freely available that allow you to stream video and MP3s to your wii, and that don't seem to crash, even after playing videos that are multiple hours long.

The only thing I'm missing is a way to easily convert the SageTV recordings to flash video (flv) files. It would be nice to have flv as a conversion option along with ipdod/dvd/php/razr on the conversion screen. Does anbody know if anything like this exists? Alternatively, I would settle for a scriptable program that can be run every so often, or listen for events, to look in the SageTV folder for new files, and convert them when they are done.

It would be really nice to get something like this working. I'll admit that the video quality isn't the best because it has to be converted to flash, but it beats nothing, or buying another computer, and sticking that beside my tv. Let me know if you have any ideas on how I can get this working.

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by kibbee

...but it beats nothing, or buying another computer, and sticking that beside my tv.

Have you considered a SageTV Media Extender? Seems like a much simpler solution than what you're trying to do.

[bcjenkins]

If you use a Mac as a computer at all Visual Hub is great for transcoding.

B

[kibbee]

I've considered the SageTV Media Extender, but the wireless version is $159, which is almost as much as the Wii itself. Also, this means that I would have to have yet another box sitting by my TV just for watching stuff I've recorded on SageTV. I already have a Wii, DVD Player (5 Disc + Dolby SS Receiver), VCR, and Digital Cable Box. I'm trying to limit having to add more hardware around my TV. Also, it seems a little expensive for me to buy the media extender when I have a computer (The Wii) sitting right there by the TV.

I've found a program called FFMPEG, which seems like it's going to be able to convert the videos to flv so that I can play them on the Wii. By customizing the bitrate for video and audio, I should be able to get fairly good quality for the video, while still making it not skip because of the slow wireless connection. It runs from the command line, so I should be able to write a program which will monitor the SageTV folder for new videos, convert them to FLV, and drop them in the correct folder.

All this seems a little cumbersome, and if anybody has any pointers on somehow working this into the Sage interface then I'd love some recommendations.

I'm really just doing this project for the fun of it, and don't really plan on watching more than a couple recordings a week this way, but I might make it available to others if I get it working well enough. I'm sure some people would find this very useful.

[scoful]

It would be cool to be able to use a Wii for this. I too have one sitting in my basement on the TV my Kids primarily use. I have thought about setting up another client for it, but don't use it a lot and would rather not have yet another thing connected to it (already have Wii, DVD player, VCR, Cable Box, and Nintendo 64).

I would think the way to do it would be with a customized version of Neilm's Web Based User Interface. However; it appears that VLC's transcoding doesn't support FLV output.

Does anybody know what video formats the Wii supports?

[nielm]

Originally Posted by kibbee

I've found a program called FFMPEG, which seems like it's going to be able to convert the videos to flv

All this seems a little cumbersome, and if anybody has any pointers on somehow working this into the Sage interface then I'd love some recommendations.

Sage's Transcoder is a modified version of ffmpeg, so you may be able to setup a transcoding options in Sage.properties for flv conversion...
Here is one to try: (deinterlaces, resizes to 640x480, video bitrate of 2Mbps, audio 128kbit MP3). It may need tweaking

transcoder/formats/FLV-High\ Quality\ Deinterlaced=f=flv;MCompressionDetails\=-deinterlace;[bf=vid;f=flv;br=2000000;w\=640;h\=480;][bf\=aud;f\=mp3;sr\=44100;ch\=2;br\=128000;]

[scoful]

Originally Posted by nielm

Sage's Transcoder is a modified version of ffmpeg, so you may be able to setup a transcoding options in Sage.properties for flv conversion...
Here is one to try: (deinterlaces, resizes to 640x480, video bitrate of 2Mbps, audio 128kbit MP3). It may need tweaking

transcoder/formats/FLV-High\ Quality\ Deinterlaced=f=flv;MCompressionDetails\=-deinterlace;[bf=vid;f=flv;br=2000000;w\=640;h\=480;][bf\=aud;f\=mp3;sr\=44100;ch\=2;br\=128000;]

Is this for V6? I'm running V5 and don't see any transcoder options in the properties file. Also - if Sage Transcodes it, how would it be accessed?

[nielm]

IIRC Converting video files to another format is a V6 feature.
You set up a conversion job which creates a new file on disk and optionally replace the existing file. There are plugins which can trigger conversion jobs automatically.

[scoful]

It seems like it would be better just to transcode to the client - and only those files you choose to watch on the client. I don't think I would want all of my videos transcoded to Flash on my other clients.

That's why I was looking at the Web Interface.

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like Wii's Opera Interface supports any kind of playlist - so it would have to be a direct, one click approach.

I did find somewhere that Wii supports MJPEG, but this may not be in Opera - couldn't tell that for sure.

[kibbee]

Thanks to all who recommended editing the sage.properties file to add another converstion profile. I had actually already figured this out last night, but it's nice to know that others have found the same solution I did. So far the best I've been able to come up with is the following:

transcoder/formats/Wii=f\=flv;[bf\=vid;f\=flv;br\=750000;fps\=29.97;w\=512;h\=384;vbr\=1;][bf\=aud;f\=mp3;sr\=44100;ch\=1;bsmp\=16;br\=64000;]

The video was a little, choppy, so I'm changing the bitrate (br) to 600000 to try to cut down on the choppyness due to slow network (most likely) and the width and height (w/h) to 320 x 240 try to get rid of excessive encoding artifacts due to the low bitrate.

It seems like the Wii can't handle large video files, either because of processing speed (less likely) or because of the slow network (most likely). Hopefully I'll be able to get a decent enough quality out of this thing.

It would be nice if they added support for some more advanced video codecs in the Wii, this flash video stuff isn't the highest quality encoder, but in the end, I think it will end up being better than buying another piece of hardware just to watch my SageTV recordings on the Wii. Adding support for MPEG4 in the Photo channel would just make this a non-issue, as I usually convert to MPEG4 to save on space anyway, and I could just put everything on SD card and watch it from there.

I'm going about creating a web-based media browsing interface with apache/php on my system. Flash encoding is just kind of the final hurdle to getting everything to work properly. Easy 1-click (or whatever many) encoding with SageTV will just make it a lot easier to add stuff to the media server.

[scoful]

How are you viewing your transcoded videos?

I presume you have to convert the entire file to FLV before you can view it on the Wii?

It would really be great if you could just watch stuff without having to convert it first, but perhaps this can't be accomplished in real time.
I guess I'll have to do some looking for a utility that will stream from MPG to FLV.

[kibbee]

There's programs out there such as the stuff at MyOrb (http://www.orb.com/) that allow you to convert the videos in real time. However I've found that first of all, the quality is really bad, because it does do real time conversion. Second of all, this program seems to experience the same problems as most other players I've seen which is stopping after 30 minutes of play.

The flashplayer I found, JW FLV Player, (http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=Flash_video_Player) is able to play videos without crashing no matter how long they play. I've played videos that are over an hour and half in length. Anyway, It looks like I've got all the bugs worked out, and that I'll just have to hack all the pieces together into something usable. I'll update more when I get something that works well.

[scoful]

I tried Orb - playback is quite choppy and low quality (although it does play pretty nicely on my Treo). It looks like this may be a hardware limitation.

I had hoped the Wii would support DVD playback (and MPEG) since it has a DVD drive!

I have read articles that DVD playback may be available on Wii's later - but it appears this will be a hardware revision.

[zzmystique]

Originally Posted by nielm

transcoder/formats/FLV-High\ Quality\ Deinterlaced=f=flv;MCompressionDetails\=-deinterlace;[bf=vid;f=flv;br=2000000;w\=640;h\=480;][bf\=aud;f\=mp3;sr\=44100;ch\=2;br\=128000;]

When using this to transcode to flv the conversion fails imediately, have tried tweaking but just can't seem to get it right.

I'm using the latest sagetv beta, PAL, the recordings are from dvbs and I have the audio and video set to default. (Installed decoder is powercinema 5.1)

Any ideas?

[autoboy]

An iphone has more processing capability than a Wii. I think you will be out of luck with anything besides low quality flash video. Get yourself a HD extender. Don't bother with the SD wireless one.

[Brent]

Using a Wii as a media extender is like using a shovel to dig a house foundation - it just wasn't built for it imo

But there is this Wii Media Center app that you might check out if your deadset on this.