NOTE: this is a legacy post ported from the old blog platform for archiving purposes
I recently came across Wiideo Center (via Nintendo Scene). A media center tool that runs on a Windows PC box to provide your Wii with a website on which to access your videos, music and pictures via the Flash 7 plugin.
I’ve tried so many other similar applications that *should* do exactly this, only they don’t: they just have nice looking menus that you *wish* led to the gold!
The Wiideo Center is great because it requires no configuration at all, and I know this could be a problem for some users, but it’s the opposite with most Wii-oriented media centers out there: too much work has gone into the configuration that the functionality has been ignored. From the start, anyone with access to port 8080 on your dear vulnerable Windows PC will have access to all of your media, sorted by drive letter. If you want to play something on a network share you must create a Windows network drive on the Wiideo Center machine. It’s just so simple! I guess this will be changed in later versions to a more secure setup.
The Wii itself has its own major quirk which makes the whole thing a little annoying when watching a feature film or potentially anything over five minutes long, and it’s that it has barely any memory to store the video. For this reason, the Wiideo Center splits any video up into five minute-long chapters, which you can preview with thumbnails.
It doesn’t support .nuv files (natively compressed MythTV recorded shows) and I’m not sure how long it will take the developer to incorporate this, but he seems keen enough as I’ve already had a reply to this suggestion. Apart from this, which is quite minor as unencoded MythTV recordings *can* be played, I only have DivX files, but they need to have the .avi extension instead of .divx (as served by Stage6). Picture support is, well, not great, but I feel it just needs maturing. Music playback is the best it can be apart from one thing:
Sorting. FTW?! All files are unsorted, somehow, and I’ve no idea why. Saying that, any coder can easily overlook this feature, but it seriously affects the music playback in that your album’s tracks will always be played at random – in the same order. Edit: this only affects Samba network drives and I’m working with the developer to get it fixed.
Much impressed and pleased. I can now play movies in my bedroom without any extra hardware.
