Before I describe the project I hold my hands up and say that if a project already exists which does this then please let me know. I hunted around and could find many components but not a single, easy to use solution.

Overview

I recently got hold of a Wii and was interested to see whether I could stream media from my home PC onto it so that I could watch that media on my plasma TV. I found an application called Orb which does exactly this but it does so much more and it's that extra functionality which I think caused it to be less than perfect for the task of streaming media. You see using Orb the Wii obtains the content via the internet. Therefore the content on your hard drive get sent to Timbuktu and back just to get from your PC to your Wii.

This seems like overkill and, more importantly, restricts your bandwidth (at maximum) to your internet connection speeds (both upload and download).

I want the limiting factor to be the speed of your wireless connection from the Wii and PC to your wireless router. And nothing whatsoever to do with your internet connection speed.

This project is all about putting an application together which people install on their home PCs and it allows them to stream content to their Wii without having to hit the internet.

Proposal
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• I want to design and develop an application which people install on their home PC.
• This allows them to specify some directories on that PC which they want to be able stream the media from.
• That media can be audio, video or pictures.
• Users then install Internet Browser on their Wii and navigate to a web page
• That web page is hosted on their home PC and provides a pleasant, easy to use, home media center interface to the directories that they have selected as holding their streamed content.
• Selected content is then converted from it's native format into a format which can be viewed on the Wii.

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Application

Write a dynamic web based interface to those shared directories which streams the media to the client on request. It'll look like a media center type application and will also have a management interface used to configure the directories which are served.
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• Wii - Nintendo's excellent gaming console
• Internet Browser - Available for download from Nintendo for the Wii (it's Opera really).
• FLV - Flash Video format. Looks to me like the only formatted supported on Internet Browser
• FFmpeg - An open-source utility which convert to dozens of media formats into dozens of other one's.
• Apache - An open-source web server. It might be over engineered for our requirements so this may change
• PHP/Perl/etc - We need a front-end technology to develop web pages in which can also do some server-side stuff to read the directories, provide dynamic content and stream the content.

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Future

How many other gaming consoles provide the capability to stream media from your PC. I have no idea. How many have internet browsers. Also, I have no idea. So there could well be the possibility of extending this to any networked device with a web browser.



Like I mentioned at the start, if this exists already let me know because I'd like to use it. If it doesn't and your at all interested in getting involved in putting this together then let me know. Any code produced would be open-source LGPL.

I have not heard of anything that exist like that for the wii yet. I like the idea of it because you are very correct that the wii is a very good system and also a very popular one (even know some might debate it). Currently I do not own a Wii (I am a PC gamer) but have used one at friends before.

Your idea seems also very solid and I like how you are going with using the web interface.

The only things that could be of concern is what file formates the wii can support. Also I would not be surprised if someone is trying to develop this same thing somewhere else because it seems a very sought feature with gaming consoles. Two possible things with that:
1. Nitendo will possibly come out with something similar to it
2. Someone is already trying to do this but is having problems due to streaming to the device and formates it supports.

Either way I think its worth developing and it would be a nice feature to see.

Internet Browser (Opera) on the Wii only seems to support the streaming of FLV (Flash Video) files. I tried a bunch of other ones and got a "media content unknown" error for each.

The web interface is a key thing because then you can be as creative as you like with that and not have to get involved into writing specifically compiled code for the Wii. It will also scale nicely into other devices that also support HTML.

After a little more googling I found this:

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

Which looks like it might just do exactly what I had intended to develop. In the interests of not reinventing the wheel I shall install this tonight and see how it works.

EDIT:

The downside of this application is that all the video must already be in FLV format. It doesn't convert on the fly.

This post has been edited by Flynn: 4 Jan, 2008 - 06:43 AM

Just found another one:

http://tversity.com/home

And another one:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/wmc/

Looks like I've got some installing and testing to do tonight.

Excellent idea! I think you can develop it in a day!
Just two links:
- How to convert anything to flv
- Go here and go to Basics > Video, and see how easily you can creata an flv streaming application. (If you install OpenLaszlo it is generally tomcat + a servlet, so be careful if you already have a tomcat installed)

You were faster, looks-like you don't have to develop anything

Perhaps next time I should do the googling first.