Admit it...you always wanted to user your Wii as a DVD player

[Queasy]

Well, now you can!

Homebrewer Erant has created a program that allows the Wii to read DVDs. It comes bundled with a media player program that lets you play DVD movies as well as view video files stored on an SD card, without any hardware modifications. You still need to be able to run homebrew on your Wii, but that's done easily enough.

The commenters in the announcement post seem to be having mixed success with the program, with results ranging from, at best "Excellent! Works like a charm." to "It doesn't seem to play DVDs on my Wii," to the worst possible outcome, "watching Hackers (1995) right now."

As a sort of proof of concept of the new DVD-reading capability for uses other than video, a patch will soon be available for Nintendo 64 emulator Wii64 to allow ROMs to be read from DVDs.

Guide on how to

 

[oznerol]

Mod your Wii to 1998 technology! DVDs and N64 games for everyone!

 

[erwos]

It's nice to have the option, but how's the video quality?

 

[R Nilla]

Originally posted by: ducci
Mod your Wii to 1998 technology! DVDs and N64 games for everyone!

:laugh: That's a neat little hack, but I think I'll stick with the four DVD players already in my apartment that do not require softmodding and amateur software to play DVDs.

It is cool that they were able to do this without having to use a modchip. I wonder how well the N64 emulation works, especially in terms of controls.

 

[AstroManLuca]

I wonder how Wii fanboys will react if and when Nintendo decides to actually include this feature? BTW, I do not have a separate standalone DVD player. I had an Xbox and then a PS2 for the longest time, so I never needed one.

 

[mugs]

Can't say I ever wanted to use my Wii as a DVD player, but if they could make it work with UPnP media servers I'd be all over that

Edit:
Oh wow, I just realized that the Wii works with TVersity via flash... does that work well?

 

[CasioTech]

that's cool if it works well and has great quality, why not.

 

[AstroManLuca]

The Wii also works with Orb. When I had one that was pretty nice. Main problems:

- The Wii's flash implementation is slow, so video quality was choppy
- Controls are limited. It wasn't easy to skip around much. I basically had to set it and forget it if I wanted to watch a video (pausing worked fine though)
- If you don't remember to turn off burn-in protection, you have to remember to point the Wii at the sensor bar every few minutes to prevent the screen from dimming.

It did work pretty well though, and it can play more video types than an Xbox 360 with its standard streaming capability (which is limited in how many codecs it can handle).

 

[mugs]

Originally posted by: AstroManLuca
The Wii also works with Orb. When I had one that was pretty nice. Main problems:

- The Wii's flash implementation is slow, so video quality was choppy
- Controls are limited. It wasn't easy to skip around much. I basically had to set it and forget it if I wanted to watch a video (pausing worked fine though)
- If you don't remember to turn off burn-in protection, you have to remember to point the Wii at the sensor bar every few minutes to prevent the screen from dimming.

It did work pretty well though, and it can play more video types than an Xbox 360 with its standard streaming capability (which is limited in how many codecs it can handle).

Not really a fair comparison since the 360 can do as much as a Wii with the same external software, and the Wii can do nothing without the external software.

My problem is, when I finally get my new house all set up, I'll have three TVs that I use frequently - bedroom, office, and family room. Two are HD, one is SD. Xbox 360 and PS3 both work great (although I wish the PS3 had artificial chapter breaks like the 360), and the Wii would be ideal for the SDTV. I guess I'll check it out tonight. If this works, I can probably do away with my HTPC, or maybe just stick it in the basement to use as a DVR + media server.

 

[RandomFool]

This is kinda neat, I travel a lot and usually end up watching DVDs on my laptop. This might actually convince me to finally get around to adding the homebrew channel.

 

[MikeyIs4Dcats]

it could come in handy for travel since the Wii is so small.

 

[frostedflakes]

DVD functionality is still pretty basic, the current MPlayer build seems to be more of a proof of concept than anything else. Nice to see progress being made, though, Wii homebrew has come a long way in the last 1/2 year.