Turning Your Wii Into a Streaming Media Center

Posted on April 12th, 2008 by Anthony Clendenen.
Categories: ConfigMgr, Cool Tools, Downloads, Free!, How-To, MMS 2008.

After you win the Wii at the 1E booth (311) at MMS and you have made Pro on all the sports, have made all your family WiiConsole members and friends into Wii peeps, the next logical step is to stream all your music and videos with it from your PC upstairs to your Wii downstairs in your media room. XBox does this out of the box (no pun intended) from what I have heard, since my daughter is only in second grade and my son is just in junior high they aren’t quite ready for an XBox, plus I suck at video games so I am not a gamer. The Wii doesn’t have a whole suite of additional features, and streaming music and video is not one of them. It does come with a built in wireless adapter so you can get it on your home wireless pretty easy. It also uses Opera for a web browser. I mention both of these because you will need them for streaming.

I was first introduced to Orb several years ago when I got my first Netgear wireless router, it was 802.11B, so that should give you some idea on how many years ago. The Orb CD came in the box and I checked it out to see what it was. Set it up, showed it off at work a few times and then I didn’t use it much again. Back when I was still working at ESRI I played Classical music in my office all day and it was local plus I didn’t want to use up the bandwidth needlessly. I looked at it again when I started to travel with my last employer (Hey everyone!) I even bought a tuner card, but I don’t really like TV, and really don’t like 99.99% of movies for a list of reasons so I didn’t really end up using Orb or the tuner card.

But now that I have a home office upstairs, and my wife’s art studio is downstairs when I am at home and the kids are in school and I am not on the phone I will play music, but I have to play music we both like and loud enough for her to hear. So this is not ideal. But our Wii is hooked up to the surround sound system and LCD downstairs, so if she could play music from it and choose her own music, and what level that would just about be perfect!

So what you will need:

Wii
The Opera browser installed on your Wii (500 Wii points or $5)
Your Wii connected to your LAN
Orb
Wake-On-LAN (if you are going to use Orb on a laptop)
A computer with music, videos, pictures, files…!

Download Orb here.

Get additional addons for Orb from their MyExtras here.

extras include video mail, watching Internet videos on your mobile device, and watching you video content on your TV instead of in Flash in the Wii’s Opera browser.

You can get version 1.0 of Orb here.

Once you have Orb installed you will have to create an account. Next specify what folders you want to include in the different categories. Keep in mind that any folder you put on there you and your family will be able to access from the Wii console.

After you have Orb configured you will need to get the browser installed on your Wii if you haven’t got it already. Once it is just go to orb.com, put in your account info and you will be listening and viewing in just a few seconds.

In Orb you can search by artist, title, genre, playlist, resume a playlist, shuffle your search results, it’s pretty nice.

And if you have bluetooth in your car, a phone with an unlimited data plan and bluetooth…

Regards,
Anthony

Anthony Clendenen | Solutions Engineer | 1E