Watch and learn: DVD on Wii how-to video
Earlier today, we reported on the better-late-than-never news that DVD playback has come to Wii, thanks to the console's burgeoning homebrew development community. We decided to give the hack a go ourselves and recorded a brief video tutorial of how you too can unlock the immense potential of the Wii's disc drive. Okay ... so you can just watch DVDs, but this is big stuff for Nintendo, folks.
The actual process is so simple – and the results, even for a first release, so impressive – that we're boggled by the fact that Nintendo hasn't simply added this functionality to the Disc Channel as part of a system update. It's a matter of downloading a small file, a hombrew video player, copying them to an SD card, and using the Homebrew Channel (a guide to installing which we've posted about previously) to apply a two-second patch. Keep reading after the break for our full impressions.
Gallery: Guide to watching DVDs on Wii
Once it's up-and-running, you can pop into the Mplayer app from the Homebrew Channel, put any video DVD in the drive, and voila – you're watching a DVD on a game console. Crazy, huh? The video quality is good, although we've found that Mplayer drops frames during more action-packed scenes in order to keep the film's audio in sync. You can disable frame dropping, but your audio and video will exist in separate time zones. There's definitely a lot of tidying up of the UI that can be done, but again, this is a first effort and Mplayer is in continual development.
We have a full rundown on the playback controls in our video; our compatriots at Wii Fanboy have put together a step-by-step gallery detailing the process of installing the Homebrew Channel and getting the necessary DVD hack files onto an SD card, which you can make with the clicky on above.
