DIY: Softmod Your Wii to Play DVDs

[ August 20th, 2008 @ 1:33 am ] ... [ C. S. Magor ]

DIY: Softmod Your Wii to Play DVDs

Until now, there have not been too many easy options to play DVDs on your Nintendo Wii. Now, thanks to the work of Erant over at Hack Mii, it is possible and it doesn’t require any hardware modifications - good news for those of us who suck at soldering.

I am not going to write a big how to, but I can point you in the right direction for all of the resources to get your Wii playing DVDs.

If you want to know how its done, read on.

First up you are going to need a bit of equipment. You will need a FAT-16 Formatted SD card (Apparently FAT32 can also work with some versions), The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (for the Twilight Hack), Wii Brew SD Installer and a computer with an SD card reader. At the time of writing I am not aware if it is possible to do this from a Mac.

Once you have all of your equipment you need to install Wii Brew SD on your SD card. Check the Wiibrew SD Installer page to ensure that you have the right version of the software for your version of Twilight princess. Note that one of the versions has some slightly different save locations for the game, but as I don’t have access to a U.S. version, I can’t really comment on that. Check the Twilight Hack page for further detail.

The Wii Brew installer gives you a number of software package options. Simply select the appropriate Twilight Hack, Homebrew Channel, Channel Browser and most importantly DVDX (this is what lets you play DVDs). Once installed, you need to get it from the SD to your Wii.

Put your prepared SD card into the SD slot of your Wii and copy the Twilight hack into the relevant Twilight Princess save game slot, then load the file within Twilight Princess.

Running the file will install the Wii Homebrew channel onto your system. With the Wii Homebrew channel running you will see the DVDx installer option. This gives you the DVD support, but you will still need a program called MPlayer to play your movies.

By now, or soon at least the version of MPlayer on the Homebrew Browser will probably have DVD support, but at this time it doesn’t. So you will have to download it, save it to the SD card and then install it on your Wii. From there you will be playing DVDs to your heart’s content.

For a more comprehensive guide to the installation process and a whole lot of pictures, take a look at Life Hacker or there are some excellent instructions on the Hack Mii site. All in all, it is an exciting piece of news for Wii owners. [Hack Mii via Life Hacker]

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