Hey, just so you know ... this post is now about 14 years and 8 months old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.I saw this post on Lifehacker yesterday about installing homebrew on the Wii without needing to use the Twilight Princess hack and decided, what the heck, let’s give it a try!
Wow, talk about amazingly simple. Only minutes after downloading the necessary files, I had the Homebrew Channel running on my Wii.
After doing a little more browsing and downloading, I had a few homebrew apps to play with.
Pretty slick. Using MPlayer I was able to play both a commercial and self-created DVD using the Wii remote for the basic controls. I’ll be honest, DVD playback on the Wii isn’t going to replace a standalone DVD player yet, but for a homebrew app, it’s pretty cool. Nintendo really should just build that functionality in! With MPlayer-Wii I was able to stream an .AVI video off of my NAS (via samba) for playback through the Wii. I hard to hardcode the filename in the configuration file, so this isn’t a complete video library solution (like what I do with my TiVos) but the possibility is there.
I played around with a few homebrew games like Duck Hunt, and plan to check out Quake and Doom. For now, as you can see from the screenshot above I’ve kept the Homebrew Browser (which allows you to install apps right from the Homebrew Channel instead of having to use your PC to download and then copy them to the SD card) and Balance Board Pro which shows off some of the features of the Wii Balance Board.
Cool stuff!
So I dumped the different MPlayer apps I had been experimenting with and went with MPlayer CE. I was able to point it to the samba share of my NAS and actually browse the hierarchy of folders and select a video to play, just like using pyTivo on my TiVos. The Wii just doesn’t have the horsepower to transcode some video formats without choppiness, but just to see it working was pretty amazing.
The latest 4.2U menu update wiped out my homebrew install over the weekend. Luckily, there’s a new version of bannerbomb that put it all back just as quickly.