Stream locally to Wii

June 4, 2007 8:30 AM

How can I stream my movie/tv collection to my Wii?

I have a Wii and an XP box full of movies. They are both on the same network.

I have Apache, PHP 5 and VLC set up on the XP box. Is there any software that I can set up on the XP machine so that I could just enter 192.168.xxx.xxx or whatever the address of the XP box is, into the Opera browser on the Wii and watch my movies on the Wii?

I've looked at the Orb streaming service, but this actually uploads the content to the internet first, which you then stream by going to the orb web site.

I would like to do it locally. Can it be done? Thanks in advance.

posted by ReiToei to computers & internet (4 comments total)

If you were to convert your videos to FLV and host them on your apache server you should be able to view them on the Wii. Much like viewing YouTube on the Wii.
posted by Hates_ at 8:43 AM on June 4, 2007

I remembered reading about this before. I went and digged up the blog post, but it is from last year so there might be more options available today.

Here is the post. Read the last few paragraphs for information on video streaming.
posted by zixyer at 9:05 AM on June 4, 2007

Yes it can be done.

But not yet, unless you're willing to kludge around with a browser solution like the above FLV idea.

Alternatively, you could have your Wii modded with a chip that will allow it to play GameCube homebrew...and therefore have a media player capable of using multiple codecs. How to get the GC to stream in the files from your network is a bit of a sticky problem though, unless you're comfortable with coding that part yourself.

And that's a perfect intro to the root problem here. You'd have to do it with GameCube homebrew because Wii homebrew doesn't yet exist. It's in the works, but it simply isn't out there yet.

The 1.2 version WiiKey modchip setup disc does have a media player, but you have to either burn the media files to the setup disc or put them in an SD Gecko GC memory card to play them. Also, the setup disc is pure GameCube mode, for the reasons above.

Time will bring Wii homebrew and neat projects like the one you're talking about.

A media player that existed on the Wii as a channel and could pull files from a file share on the network would be ideal, and I'm sure that if Nintendo released one on the shopping channel it would sell by metric dookieloads.

My best suggestion is to find the forums where the people who are working on homebrew hang out and volunteer to help any way you can.
posted by SlyBevel at 11:47 AM on June 4, 2007

Within the same subnet or home network, Orb will stream direct between computers.
posted by reddot at 1:53 PM on June 4, 2007