Wii media centre on Linux?

[Colin Turner]

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Hi,

I got curious today as to whether the Wii can be persuaded to act as a
rudimentary media centre. Looks like from a quick google it can,
although one of the products is discontinued.

Is anyone here doing this already?

CT.
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[Ryan Grieve]

You might want to look into the twilight princess hack and the homebrew channel that can be installed via it. Means a chip free method to run homebrew. I also hear you can run basic distro's this way. I intended to try it out but my SD card has gone missing.

Grieve.

[Colin Turner]

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Hi Ryan,

Ryan Grieve wrote:
> You might want to look into the twilight princess hack and the
> homebrew channel that can be installed via it. Means a chip free
> method to run homebrew. I also hear you can run basic distro's this
> way. I intended to try it out but my SD card has gone missing.

I'd read about that hack before actually, although back then it didn't
look like much existed homebrew so to speak I will look again, thanks.

I should have said though, that probably all I was thinking about doing
was streaming mp3s to the wii from a linux box. Looks like rudimentary
servers that talk to Opera on the wii have existed before.

http://www.redkawa.com/mediacenters/wiimediacenterx/

But I'd prefer something free (as in freedom) and maintained.

However, natively running other stuff on the Wii itself is something I
should look at, the real issue is though getting media from something
with sensible quantities of disk space to the Wii itself.

Thanks,

CT.
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[Ryan Grieve]

A quick way to do that without hacks would be to get speakers in your living room connected to the linux box, and use a web frontend for mpd via wii-opera. Tho from what i've read of the homebrew recently, there should be a far more elegant solution.

I'm hoping to get some kind of freevo like functionality out of my wii whenever i could be bothered to work on it. But it might be a while.

Grieve.

-original message-
Subject: [blug-chat] Re: Wii media centre on Linux?
From: Colin Turner <c...@piglets.com>

[Daniel Reid]

http://wii-news.dcemu.co.uk/

For all your news on Wii homebrew.  As I'm hopefully starting Electronics and Software Engineering at Queens in September, I've been learning some C++ recently and hope to start writing a few applications for the Wii.  The Homebrew channel is a good standard with which to run applications with, and after trying MediaCenterX (which is an old product, however worked flawlessly with the Wii until it became broken and discontinued.. a media center system / application is something that the Wii lacks currently.

You have the advantage of updating GameCube homebrew to take advantage of the Wii's new hardware (and thank the GPL for allowing you to do do with discontinued projects), however I feel this is a little beyond by depth at present.  It would be interesting if a Belfast programmer wrote the first fully featured media centre stack for the Wii.  I'll just remind that the only Media Centre product I've sene is the one mentioned above by Red Kawa, and all it is is simply a flash based streaming application - something you could do youself with Winamp on Windows.  Porting PulseAudio would be interesting, but it looks like you're looking for an actual media centre, Colin.  SMS was a good application for the PS2 - I might even see if such a thing could be brought to the Wii (SMS is still updated, dispite the PS2 being on it's last legs, especially with homebrew software development).

Daniel

[Jonathan McDowell]

On Sat, Jun 14, 2008 at 11:19:11PM +0100, Colin Turner wrote:

> I got curious today as to whether the Wii can be persuaded to act as a
> rudimentary media centre. Looks like from a quick google it can,
> although one of the products is discontinued.

When I last investigated all products that didn't require you to modify
the Wii were based on re-encoding media so that Opera on the Wii could
play it. There's some homebrew work on getting XBMX ported to the Wii
which should be pretty nifty, but I think all there is at present are
some screenshots.

J.

--
Web [ Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. ]
site: http:// [ ] Made by
www.earth.li/~noodles/ [ ] HuggieTag 0.0.23

[Ryan Grieve]

Got my hands on another sd card today and successfully installed the homebrew channel in about 5 minutes. Very elegant piece of brewing, i was impressed. Installed the devkit on my laptop too and i'm gonna try the wiiload method for launching code on my wii wirelessly from the pc.

On the media center front, the best bet is wii miidia which looks set for a release soon enough.

[Colin Turner]

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Hi Ryan,

Ryan Grieve wrote:
> A quick way to do that without hacks would be to get speakers in your
> living room connected to the linux box, and use a web frontend for
> mpd via wii-opera.

Not as trivial as it sounds, it's one end of the house to another,
wheras I do have perfectly good cat5 cables going there you see :-).

I read your next post about the homebrew, and that sounds more
promising, I'll add it to my "things to do in the theoretically less
busy time in the summer" queue :-).

Thanks,

CT.

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[Colin Turner]

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Hi Daniel,

Daniel Reid wrote:
> http://wii-news.dcemu.co.uk/

Thanks, had a quick look. It does seem to be coming on.

> For all your news on Wii homebrew. As I'm hopefully starting
> Electronics and Software Engineering at Queens in September, I've been
> learning some C++ recently

Good luck with that, if you'd have come to the other place (Ulster) I
might well have been teaching you that, though actually I only teach the
final years on software these days. :-)

[..]

> Porting PulseAudio would be interesting, but it looks like you're
> looking for an actual media centre, Colin. SMS was a good application
> for the PS2 - I might even see if such a thing could be brought to the
> Wii (SMS is still updated, dispite the PS2 being on it's last legs,
> especially with homebrew software development).

The Pulse Audio idea isn't without merit, but essentially all I really
want is to be able to play content off my LAN in some easy to interface
way with the wii. I'll probably relent and buy a PS3 some day and that's
a much simpler route, but in the meantime, looks like homebrew is the
way to go.

CT.

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[Ryan Grieve]

First one to 'brick' their wii buys the pints! :)

-original message-
Subject: [blug-chat] Re: Wii media centre on Linux?
From: Colin Turner <c...@piglets.com>

Date: 17/06/2008 12:03 am

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Hi Ryan,

Ryan Grieve wrote:
> A quick way to do that without hacks would be to get speakers in your
> living room connected to the linux box, and use a web frontend for
> mpd via wii-opera.

Not as trivial as it sounds, it's one end of the house to another,
wheras I do have perfectly good cat5 cables going there you see :-).

I read your next post about the homebrew, and that sounds more
promising, I'll add it to my "things to do in the theoretically less
busy time in the summer" queue :-).

Thanks,

CT.

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[Colin Turner]

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Hi Jonathan,

>> I got curious today as to whether the Wii can be persuaded to act as a
>> rudimentary media centre. Looks like from a quick google it can,
>> although one of the products is discontinued.
>
> When I last investigated all products that didn't require you to modify
> the Wii were based on re-encoding media so that Opera on the Wii could
> play it. There's some homebrew work on getting XBMX ported to the Wii
> which should be pretty nifty, but I think all there is at present are
> some screenshots.

Yes, it seems homebrew is the consensus, and that app (XBMC?) looks a
reasonably feasible idea. I'll try to do some tinkering in a week or two.

Thanks,

CT.

PS. Hope the superior air cooling is helping the CPU performance

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[Jonny Mayne]

Hate to be the bringer of bad news guys:

http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=153265

Let's face it though, somebody will probably work out a way round it.

Jonny.

[Ryan Grieve]

Clever Nintendo. They actually released an update that *specifically* stops the twilight hack by checking string length in save files. But a way around has already been found! Turns out there are two *unreleased* bugs in the new code that, together, allow the same hack to run. Plus existing installations of the homebrew channel will still execute code. All is not lost. Just postponed! Haha.

Grieve.

-original message-
Subject: [blug-chat] Re: Wii media centre on Linux?