Want to Watch Movies On Your Wii?

For those in the know, Xbox Media Center (XBMC) is one of the greatest homebrew applications ever created. It perfectly streams movies, videos, pictures and more from your computer or the Xbox’s internal harddrive onto your TV, turning last-generations behemoth into a wonderfully powerful media center experience. Unfortunately, running XBMC takes two things that you probably don’t have: an old Xbox lying around, and the correct tools to do dastardly deeds to the consoles innards to either soft mod (through applications) or hard mod (through actual computer chips) the Xbox in question. Sure, you could just run out and plunk down $300-400 for one of those other consoles that have limited playback support, but what’s the fun in that?

Wii owners handy with their Twilight Princess discs, rejoice! Wii Miidia is here to save the day! With a core program that clevery “borrows” from XBMC, WiiMiidia 0.1 will let you play back most any common movie or music format on your TV in no time. While it’s certainly a work in progress (and has quite a few bugs to be worked out as time goes on), creator dCiSo deserves a big pat on the back for doing what Nintendidn’t. Why Nintendo couldn’t allow for simple movie playback from SD card is beyond me, but luckily those of us with a little patience and computer know-how can be watching Sanford and Son on our Wii in no time. And how!

Click on the image of WiiMiidia in action to find out more details.

Homebrewers Sucessfully Hack the Wii!

If you’re anything like me, you’d probably give Wii homebrew a shot if it didn’t involve cracking its pretty little case open and testing your mad soldiering skills. To those of us who still like to keep our system’s warranties mildly intact (and free of burn holes), hackers over at TehSkeen have apparently been successful in running four whole lines of code without touching it’s valuable innards. According to the hackers in question, the process was achieved by altering a saved game for The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess in order to make it crash the system and subsequently load the four lines of homebrew code.

Only four lines of code, you say? As Brakken noted on the initial post, it’s only in a days work. They’ve apparently already doubled that amount within a few days and status updates are expected anytime soon. With a little luck and time, hackers should be able to get real working Wii homebrew to load on the console, enabling new games and possibilities for the tens of millions of Wii owners worldwide. Let’s hope that these guys can get something working soon, because as anyone who played a soft-modded Xbox knows, a solderless homebrew alternative to modchips is always a welcome one.