Video Playback

The Wii is capable of playing back video under Wii-Linux reasonably well if you prepare it properly. The GameCube does not have the CPU horsepower, spare RAM, nor I/O bandwidth, to playback any form of video.

Formats

• MPEG-1: Works well
• MPEG-2: Works well (recommended format)
• H.264: Works only for very low-FPS (~16FPS at best) content
• Others: Untested

Considerations

• Runtime rescaling is far too taxing; you must rescale video content to exactly match the target framebuffer resolution ahead of playback
• Video is streamed from disk; if your storage medium is too slow it will become a bottleneck
• Audio seems to be unusually taxing and causes stuttering in the video stream, with warnings like [aist#0:1/mp2 @ 0x5a2250] Resumed reading at pts 32.592 with rate 1.050 after a lag of 0.489s appearing in the logs
• The Wii cannot output HD video, so don't expect stunning quality out of it

Optimal commands

• For converting your content to the optimal format (MPEG-2) at the target resolution (640x448) at decent quality: ffmpeg -i <input file> -c:v mpeg2video -b:v 1400k -maxrate 2500k -bufsize 2000k -qmax 40 -g 15 -bf 2 -vf "scale=640:448:force_original_aspect_ratio=decrease,pad=640:448:(ow-iw)/2:(oh-ih)/2:black" -c:a mp2 -b:a 128k <output>.mpg` (replace <input file> with your input filename and <output> with your output filename)
• For playback (run under a VT, not Xorg): ffmpeg -re -i <file>.mpg -pix_fmt rgb565be -f fbdev /dev/fb0 (replace <file> with your filename)
  • To add audio playback (although it will probably make your video stutter), add -f alsa default to the end