Stream Video to Wii without Orb

August 20, 2008 8:29 PM

Is there a way to stream video to my Wii from my Mac using VLC? I am currently running Orb from the virtual windows machine on the mac I access via vmware fusion, but I am not too impressed with the video quality.
posted by jules1651 to computers & internet (5 comments total)

Aside from the browser hack, I know of no way in the default Nintendo firmware to stream video to the Wii.

There may be homebrew available that does it, but as I understand it, the Wii is a PITA to hack.
posted by Netzapper at 8:57 PM on August 20, 2008

You can use Wii Transfer, which runs natively on OS X. It supports all kinds of video formats.
posted by jedicus at 9:05 PM on August 20, 2008

This depends. Are you trying to stream video within the Internet Channel like with Youtube? If so, I don't really have many tips to stream it to HTTP. If the Wii supported network streams out of the box, I've never heard of this, and forgive me for sounding like an idiot.

There is currently a huge homebrew scene for the Wii thanks to an exploit found in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess disc (Wii, not Gamecube version). If you copy a hacked savefile to your SD card and copy that to the Wii's memory, it will install a "Homebrew Channel" which you can use to run homebrew apps, which include simple games (ie a clone of Duck Hunt), emulators for 16-bit and earlier systems (SNES, Sega Genesis, NES, Gameboy Color, SCUMM LucasArts games), and, most importantly for this question, a native port of the Mplayer media player. What I find odd is that there are two versions of Mplayer on the Wii right now for some reason: a version for DVDs which has trouble reading files on the SD card for me and apparently is incapable of running streams, and a version which can play streams and files with little if any trouble, but which cannot play DVDs. Hopefully, the two will be merged. I have both installed.

If you install that, you can have VLC on your Mac send a stream to Mplayer on the Wii. These video homebrew apps can be a bit buggy, but they usually either work, or clearly don't work for a stream/file, so that's a good thing. Homebrew Channel helpfully shows your Wii's IP when you hit the Home button.

I know I wrote a lot of text, so I hope I didn't scare you away from Wii homebrew, which, for me, has validated the purchase of my system. This is a link to the Homebrew Channel, which can be installed by setting up an APPS directory and placing boot.elf from the download on an SD card you'll use while running the Twilight Princess hacked file. I'm sure there's a good guide out there which someone else will link to. Here's the MPlayer which I can get to work with local files and streams. This is the URL for the hack and Mplayer which plays DVDs, if I piqued your interest.

This is a decent guide. Also check out tehskeen.com and wiibrew.org for homebrew info.
posted by mccarty.tim at 9:17 PM on August 20, 2008 [6 favorites has favorites]

I figure, after reading Netzapper's comment, I should point out that so long as you have a copy of Twilight Princess laying around, installing homebrew on the Wii is plenty easy. It's not a firmware hack, either. It's just installing a new channel. This program should make it easy enough to do it. Just make sure you have the right version of Mplayer, (0.5 or later), and you should be fine.

If the program doesn't do it for you, just drag and drop the Mplayer folder containing the .dol or .elf file into the APPS directory on the SD card.
posted by mccarty.tim at 9:24 PM on August 20, 2008

You can try upgrading to Fusion 2.0 beta 2. Video in the guest is supposed to be much better. It's also a free upgrade from 1.x. Disclaimer: I work for VMware.
posted by troyer at 12:29 AM on August 21, 2008