Netflix streaming coming to Wii

[Amon]

Yet another thing Canadians can not use! Curse you CRTC, let me watch movies on my consoles!

[Dakinggamer87]

Great for Wii owners but I will use my PS3/360 for my Netflix streaming.

[Dylan]

Sweet. I'll definitely be looking into this.

[executioner]

I don't get it. If you softmod your Wii, isn't there a homebrew app that will play DVDs? But I remember when the Wii was in it's first year, I read a quote from Nintendo saying to add DVD playback support is more than just a firmware upgrade. But if you can do it with a homebrew app, why can't Nintendo add it via a software upgrade?

Yes it does play DVDs, if you install DVDx. Mediaplayer CE is the best homebrew player so far. An officialy added dvd playback support would be something very attractive for people buying a Wii.

[DownSince86]

I don't get it. If you softmod your Wii, isn't there a homebrew app that will play DVDs? But I remember when the Wii was in it's first year, I read a quote from Nintendo saying to add DVD playback support is more than just a firmware upgrade. But if you can do it with a homebrew app, why can't Nintendo add it via a software upgrade?

Yes it does play DVDs, if you install DVDx. Mediaplayer CE is the best homebrew player so far. An officialy added dvd playback support would be something very attractive for people buying a Wii.

It won't ever happen officially.

Since mid-2009 all new Wiis produced have a new chipset for the DVD drive which is called the D3-2 chipset. Basically what Nintendo did was remove the ability for the drive to read traditional DVDs, so it is no longer possible to watch DVD movies or load data from DVDs. If you have a Wii with that chipset all it can do is read data from official Wii and Gamecube discs.

If you want this ability but have a Wii with the new chipset all you can do is find an older revision of the DVD drive and install in into the new Wii.

Mine was purchased a short time before Christmas after the USA launch. I believe it may be a console purchased on launch day as I bought it off ebay (yes I did pay too much for it). I've softmodded mine and have watched a few DVD movies on it and honestly it isn't anything worth getting excited about. I'm sure a more polished "official" application with a fancy interface would look better than mplayer does but at the end of the day it is just a DVD movie. I have so many devices in my house already with the ability to play back DVDs that using the Wii for that never really crosses my mind and if I didn't already own one the ability to playback DVDs would not be a deciding factor for me.

That said I do watch a lot of video on my Wii. I have a 1TB HDD hooked up to it with several TV shows, cartoons, and movies. I watch them all with MplayerCE and have yet to run in to a file it couldn't play. This works out great for me as I enjoy watching movies in my living room with family/company instead of begin hunched over my computer desk with a smaller screen. The only downside is the lack of HD content but honestly I don't miss it THAT much. There is the odd movie that I'd rather watch in HD but aside from football games most of the content I watch looks just fine in SD.

Anyway as nice as it would be it won't ever happen. Hopefully Nintendo will start supporting HDDs officially at some point though, begin able to store Wiiware/VC games/DLC on something other than the internal NAND and SD-cards would really be useful. Speaking of, when are we going to be able to run Wiiware without having to copy it to the NAND first? Triiforce allows me to do this right now but NAND emulation is still too buggy right now for it to be a good replacement.