Good news for Wii owners

death1234567

Microsoft and Sony's claims that they can provide gamers with media centre qualities over the Nintendo Wii are about to come to an end following an announcement from software maker X-OOM.

The software range has announced that it is launching a new piece of software in October that will turn the Nintendo Wii into a fully functional media centre.

The software will allow users to access all digital media on a PC via the Wii�s built-in Wi-Fi capability, allowing users to access their music, view photos and watch films on their Nintendo Wii without having to have the PC in the same room.

Network connection can be done through WLAN or LAN and the software supports MP3, WMA, OGG, DivX, XviD, MPEG 2, MPEG4, WMV, JPG, BMP file formats.

The X-OOM Media Centre for Wii is priced at £29.99 and will be available from www.X-OOM.com and www.amazon.co.uk.

http://news.sky.com/skynews/xml/article/tech/0,,91221-10332,00.html

Kanney

Interesting.... I hate streaming tho.

thebman

Kanney wrote:

Interesting.... I hate streaming tho.

Why would you hate streaming?

This should install, if you need to put the disc in, it kind of defeats the purpose because you could just put your DVD in the drive or hook your laptop up to your TV and it wouldn't be much more hassle.

death1234567

brim4brim wrote:

Why would you hate streaming?

This should install, if you need to put the disc in, it kind of defeats the purpose because you could just put your DVD in the drive or hook your laptop up to your TV and it wouldn't be much more hassle.

I imagine it will be available to download from the wii store like the opera browser is now.

Riesen_Meal

death1234567 wrote:

I imagine it will be available to download from the wii store like the opera browser is now.

I wouldnt think so, its third party software, theres loads of these-type things for PS3 and 360 already.....

vinnyor

Fieldog wrote:

I wouldnt think so, its third party software, theres loads of these-type things for PS3 and 360 already.....

Well, Nintendo did mention 'Wii Ware' a few months ago saying that they were letting third party developers create software for download via the Shopping Channel. Maybe this is one of the first? I can't see how it would work otherwise.

There's software available for free that does this already (like Orb) but they don't stream directly like this one seems to do, they send it over the internet from the PC and then download it to the web browser on the Wii.

Would be pretty cool to be able to watch whatever you wanted using just one thing though, store all your dvd's and movies etc on your pc and watch them using the Wii mote simply by pointing.

Sometimes I find myself wondering why my DVD controls don't seem to move the cursor around the TV screen after getting used to the Wii , so would be cool to be able to do this.

But we'll wait and see, it could be rubbish.

daedalus2097

brim4brim wrote:

it kind of defeats the purpose because you could just put your DVD in the drive

You can watch DVDs on your Wii?

slave1

You can watch DVDs on your Wii?

via modded Wii and updated firmware, but why bother with a 480p output from the wii when 720p/1080i output dvd/divx players are cheap as chips

qwertplaywert

Would this need a internet connection?

vinnyor

Anyone hear anything more about this X-oom Media thingy for Wii? Thinking of getting it as a prezzie for someone but can't seem to find much about it online.

jimmycrackcorm

I use orb myself on the Wii. Does the business.

pug_

Just been looking into this myself, and there are a number of options for a wii multimedia centre, but all of them that I've found depend on the opera browser for functionality so whatever format you have on your PC will need to be converted to flash before it can be viewed.

Orb has already been mentioned, and it looks to work fine, though the whole notion of having to login to a site on the Internet to watch videos on your PC upstairs bugs me a little, the fact that it's free helps though. This one is windows only.

TVersity looks to be another good bet, this one encodes your videos on the fly using windows media player so you'll have to make sure you have the supported codecs for it to work properly. It's also free, and apparently they're developing a linux version, though I read that on someone's blog so don't know how true it is.

I'm not convinced by X-oom I have to say, in it's promo page for the wii software they say "Convert single files or batches (movies, TV series, fun clips etc) to a Wii specific file format " which suggests to me that you'll have to manually convert all your files yourself before you can watch them, meaning a lot of work, time while it converts, and double the disk space if you don't want to delete the original file. At 30-40 odd euro I think I'd prefer the free option.

For the more adventurous there's wiiCR an open source multi platform wii media centre. It looks to be in the very early stages of development, and even though they've given up on the windows version already the fact that it's still being developed under linux and does on the fly conversions is a bonus for me anyway.

Last one I looked at is wii media centre x This one looks very nice even though it's only in early alpha stages at the moment. It's also free multi platform (Win, Mac OS X, linux) and the only real downside is that videos have to be converted to .flv format before they can be streamed, though they also provide a free tool for the conversions.

There is another mac only option I came across wii transfer but I didn't even look at the website, and it's about €15.

There are other very good options out there for Internet radio and the likes such as wii hear, and finetune, or sites optimised for streaming youtube on the wii like viewii and wiitoob so plenty to keep people entertained imo anyway.

The_B_Man

theres also a built in thing with the new version of WinAmp! does the same thing for free!