Watching DVDs On Your Wii


Nintendo Wii Fanboy explains how to watch DVDs on your Wii using the new MPlayer application. Although the reviews are mixed, some claim it works and others claim it doesn’t, most are excited about this new feature which has been missing since the Wii’s launch. To get this working, you need to run the Twilight Hack and get the Homebrew Channel. Then you download the MPlayer software onto your SD card and install that using the Homebrew Channel. From there, you can launch the application and play your DVDs with ease using the minimalistic DVD player interface.

Although this seems like a lot of work just to watch a DVD, especially considering this might not work for you, it is interesting to see people trying to push for media center software on the Wii. Now they only need to find ways to get past the Nintendo’s attempts to stop this Homebrew movement.

Wii Menu 3.3 Already Circumvented


Well, that didn’t take long. Three days after the release of the Wii Menu 3.3 update (which prevents homebrew loading on the Wii by killing a special hack), the update has been circumvented. The update targeted the ubiquitous Twilight Hack, which allows homebrew software to be loaded from the Wii’s SD card slot by using a special game save. The team at HackMii were quick to disassemble, analyze, and scoff at the update, with member [bushing] quipping “we are not impressed.” The team found bug exploits for new code in the the update that cause it to ignore the Twilight Hack. They have yet to release the fix to the public, but its likely that they’ll do so at least as fast as they developed it.

[via Wii Fanboy]
[photo: cibomahto]

Wii Upgrade Breaks Twilight Hack


Nintendo’s latest menu upgrade for the Wii, version 3.3, has broken the long standing Twilight Hack. In the past, you could load a hacked Twilight Princess save game to execute arbitrary code. After the upgrade, the Wii now deletes the hacked save game. The Homebrew Channel seems to have remained intact. So, if you’ve already added it and you upgrade, you should be fine. There’s no telling how long before homebrew code will be completely locked out though.

[photo: cibomahto]

Homebrew Channel For Wii

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/6ji2imug_bc]

Had enough Nintendo homebrew action yet? We haven’t either. Especially not now that the doors to the homebrew scene have been blown open by The Homebrew Channel. Up to this point, the only way you could run homebrew on an unmodded Wii was the Twilight Hack, which leveraged a flaw in Twilight Princess save games. The Homebrew Channel lets you launch various homebrew apps with a useful GUI instead of performing the hack every time you want to run them. It can access apps stored on an SD card, a computer on the same network, and even USB Gecko. There is no USB flash drive or DVD support at the moment.

The Homebrew Channel can be loaded onto the Wii by running the Twilight Hack (don’t worry, it’ll probably be for the last time) with the Homebrew Channel Files in the root of your SD card. The Wii will reboot and then the channel will appear in the list. We tested it ourselves, and found that everything loaded properly from the SD card (we didn’t try the other sources). We did run into a problem where it failed to load any of our homebrew apps or even reboot properly if a Gamecube memory card was in the slot, but it’s an easy fix, just pull it out.

The devteam behind this release wanted to make things as easy and accessible as possible, so they included download links to the Twilight Hack, The Homebrew Channel, and even a homebrew software bundle to get you started. If you want more homebrew apps, head to Wiibrew.

[via everywhere]