Watching videos on the Wii (a Wii Media Centre)
Your videos on your Wii
I've been looking into the best way of playing videos (from my main machine) on my Wii recently. I'm sure lots of people have a stack of video files sitting on their main computer, tucked away in a spare bedroom and a Wii hooked up to a nice large TV in their living room (with comfy sofas etc), and I've often thought how handy it would be to have an interface to be able to watch them on the big TV via the Wii.
This is a subject I have spent alot of time on recently, and my endeavours have only recently started to show any real merit, so I thought it was time to write a little bit about them. This is the basic theory.
If you have a wireless network...
With your main machine on it...
And your Wii...
Given that the Wii's browser can display videos from sites like YouTube, surely it must be possible to stream videos over to your Wii with relative ease.
There are already a few programs that you can download for this purpose. One of the most popular is Wii Media Centre X, basically a Java app that has it's own webserver built-in which serves videos in Flash Video format to the Wii. Simple. But it has one limitation which prevented me from wanting to use it. All the videos you wanted to watch on the Wii had to be in Flash format, which meant either converting your entire video stash to FLV format (an losing quite bit of quality on most of them), or make two copies of each video (essentially doubling the space required for your media). Neither of these two approaches I found very favourable, and the hassle of going upstairs, converting a video, then going back down to watch it just seemed silly.
This is where the basic premise for my project comes in. A way of converting videos on the fly, for playing on the Wii. Over the next few posts I wil explain how I achieved this, and give you the source files if you fancy a go yourself.