OUseful Info

Wii Observations

So I finally got a Wii and after a fun evening putting my shoulder out playing golf and pulling a muscle that makes it painful to sit down playing baseball, I got the Wii online: after a bit of faffing around searching for a MAC address for my router (it's one of the Wii settings menu) the Wii sniffed out the Wifi network and autodiscovered the security model, then prompted me for my Wifi network password.

I was hoping to find a browser as one of the Wii internet channels (weather and the news appear to be the defaults) but I'm a couple of months too late on that one - it seems the free-to-download Opera browser offer ran out at the end of June, so I had to pop along to the Wii online shop to buy some Wii points - 1000 for 7 quid - of which I then spent 500 on the Wii internet channel/Opera browser.

Google and Yahoo are both offered as pre-favourited search options, but I was more interested in the extent to which I could use the Wii as a media center for streamed web content using Wii optimised websites (minimal text, large buttons, clean interface).

This helpful post on Five resources to create a Wii media center turned up Finetune, an online music streaming service that delivers tunes by music type or artist (in the same sense that Last.fm creates a radio station by artist - i.e. it's mainly musically related artists...)

I'm listening to Ozric Tentacles at the moment, via Hawkwind Radio :-)

Another site I have added to my Wii favourites list is Viewii, a Wii optimised front-end to Youtube:

The first thing I tuned in to was the Machine is Us/ing Us video, which seemed to play okay (not brilliantly, but okay...) on a big screen...

Earlier in the evening, we'd had a play on the Wii Photo Channel, which runs a slideshow of photos from a camera SD memory card. I didn't work out at the time how to add our own soundtrack, but I'm sure it can't be that hard.

My daughter also built a couple of custom Mii avatars - one for herself and one for a friend. Glancing at the manual, it seems you can 'export' these to a Wiimote handset, and then offload them onto someone else's console. I knew that Mii characters could traverse the net, and visit friend's consoles that way, but being able to use a Wiimote as a vector is a very neat idea :-)

The Wii has been a joy to set up so far - with generally helpful and intuitive interfaces - although I'm a little wary about much we might spend buying casual games for it... (I'd buy flOw for it any day of the week...)

Posted by ajh59 at August 15, 2007 01:06 AM