Nintendo Wii Gets DVD Playback Thanks to Homebrew

Console modders have developed a way to enable DVD movie playback on the Nintendo Wii.

The Wii features a DVD drive as its games are written on DVD media. The Wii cannot, however, play DVD movies out of the box as Nintendo has seen fit to exclude the feature from the console.

The likely explanation is that a DVD movie playback license would have cut into Nintendo’s profit margin, while the associated costs wouldn’t have helped the games company move any more boxes than it already had.

Thanks to the work of a homebrewer known as Erant, adding DVD playback capabilities to the Wii only require a bit of adventurous spirit. One only requires a Wii that’s homebrew enabled with no need for any hardware modification.

“The DVDX installer instead will install a small, hidden, channel on your Wii that allows you to read DVDs on an unmodified system,” Erant explained in the release post.

Installation of the DVD access libraries, coupled with media player software mplayer will not only enable DVD movies, but also video playback of files stored on an SD card. Of course, any user attempting such actions on his or her Wii should understand that it will likely void the warranty. A detailed guide on how to get homebrew up and running may consult Wii Fanboy.

DVD playback was actually a feature promised by Nintendo during the launch of the Wii in late 2006. While movie support was never a part of the initial console’s blueprints, Nintendo said that it would release a version of the Wii that would double as a movie player sometime in 2007. Given the unbelievable demand of the Wii, Nintendo probably saw little incentive (or even had little capacity) to introduce another SKU onto the market.