Workin' For The Wiikend

After acquiring my first DriveKey-powered "try before you buy" Wii game via torrent (and having a little fun fighting the Joker's minions off while occasionally blowing Robin into his component bricks with a well-placed BatBomb), I decided tonight to do a little more hacking. Thanks, CanadaMods.ca!

So, with the wife out watching some chick-flick w/ a friend, I got to spend a few hours playing with the HomeBrew Channel on my Wii. Very cool stuff available, from game emulators & ports, to new games, media players, and utilities. Complete list here.

To set up the HomeBrew Channel, follow these steps, including installation of the DVDx application so your Wii can play video DVDs.

Then, install the HomeBrew Browser, and grab some more software. After numerous tests, crashes, and reboots, I found that the best three options for playing video are these, all available through the HomeBrew Browser or via manual download from wiibrew.org.

Here's what I tested:

App	2G SD card w/ .mp3	Bus-powered 2.5" 500G USB drive w/ .avi	DVD-R w/ .avi	DVD-R Video DVD (burned w/ growisofs from dl'd .avi torrent) [1]	Video DVD (original, possibly DVD-DL? or DVD+R)
GeeXboX (embedded linux)	Y	Y	N	N	N
MPlayer CE	Y	Y	Y	Y	N
MPlayer TT			Y	Y	N

So, while I have scripted the process for easily converting .avi to DVD, I now no longer need to do so -- I can just plug my USB drive directly into the Wii and watch it on the big screen w/o having to waste hours in format conversion. Wii!

Video Codecs & Unpacking Script

BitTorrent a lot?

Annoyed at always having to unrar, move the resulting video file, then move the source folder out of your incoming folder and into your 'ready to be deleted when share ratio is > 1' folder? (I use > 3.) I am. Here's a quick unpack script for doing the above in one simple command. Works with foo.rar and foo.part01.rar as the input file.

Secondly, do you find sometimes you can't play the videos you've downloaded? Or you try to share them with someone, and they work great for you but that someone can't play them? Here's a quick list of places to get a/v codecs/players for Windows. You may not need all of these, but if you can't play audio or video, try these. As always, YMMV.

1. Install updated Windows Media Player & DivX Codec/Player Bundle
2. Install codecs from c|net: [1], [2], [3] and Nimo

For linux users (*ubuntu, debian, etc.) see these walkthroughs for installing libdvdcss and w32codecs: [1], [2], [3].