Digital videos and photos are no longer in the realm of the geek. Nowadays even the average person has a large collection of digital music, movies,and videos… and these are usually located on the family computer. What if you want to watch your movies or share your latest vacation photos in your living room? Not everyone has a fancy media server or Media Center PC (in addition to the Media Center Extenders). So, what do you do?
The Wii is one of the most popular consoles today, partially due to its very inexpensive price point. If you have one of these small electronic units, then you can easily transform it into a central entertainment device. With X-oom’s Media Center Extender for Wii XE, you can view photo slideshows, listen to internet radio and MP3s, watch YouTube, and watch pre-recorded movies and TV shows in just about any popular format.
With X-OOM Media Center for Wii enjoy your favorite collections of movies, photos, and music on your TV, via your Wii™. No need to transfer them to CD, DVD or other devices. All you need is your PC, your Wii™ and a network connection.
X-OOM Media Center for Wii™ enables easy, direct access to all media files on your PC via WLAN or LAN.
Watch, manage and edit your collections of movies, photos, and music on your TV, using your wireless Wii™ control. With the clearly arranged menu and simple navigation, internet browsing becomes an enjoyable experience. There are more than 1,000 internet radio and TV channels to enjoy.
Turn your front room into your personal multimedia station with this all-in-one entertainment center.
- Direct access to all your movies, videos, photos, music etc.
- Fool-proof installation and navigation
- Optimized for widescreen (16:9)
- Access to more than 1,000 radio and TV channels
- Streaming of multimedia files (audio/video)
- Extensive support of media files: MP3, WMA, OGG, DivX®, Xvid, MPEG2, MPEG4, WMV, JPG, BMP etc.
- Common network connection through WLAN or LAN
System requirements:
Wii including webbrowser and internet access, PC including Windows 2000/XP/ Vista and internet access, CPU 1,5 GHz, 512 MB of RAM, screen resolution of 1024 x 768 or higher, 500 MB of free disk space for installation. A LAN or WLAN.
Read on to see how it all works…
Installation
When I saw this product, I originally thought the software would install on my Wii, storing itself to internal flash memory. Not so, as MC4W XE is software that can only be installed on Windows PCs. Media Center for Wii is essentially a web host that converts your media to Flash in real time. Your Wii must connect to your PC via the Wii’s optional browser (meaning you have to shell out an additional $20). Because of the nature of how this software works, there should be no reason why any web-enabled client (such as a PSP, laptop, or even a Nintendo DS) couldn’t connect.
Installation and configuration of the host software is actually very easy. After going through a rather standard installation wizard, you are presented with a configuration wizard which allows you to add media, which can be done automatically. The first step in the wizard asks you for an optional PIN number, which any client must enter before accessing media, but you can leave this blank if you like.
The next few screens allows you to add Internet radio, podcasts, and other online media. Unfortunately, there are none that are pre-defined, so you must manually add them. No pre-defined media exists, but installing the online update gives you a TON of pre-defined Podcasts, RSS feeds,
Next are a few screens where you can add music, movies and videos. You can manually select certain folders that you want Media Center to scan, or you can let Media Center XE scan your entire computer. Scanning your entire PC is the default option, and can take a very, very long time for it to complete. You cannot continue the wizard until the scan is completely finished (or cancelled). Don’t worry, you can always add more media later.
Once the media is added, the host window presents you with six tabs: Start Media Center, Browse Library, Media File Wizard (which you just went through), Library Settings, Program Settings, and Help.
The Browse Library lets you see all the media that MC4W has found, which is conveniently grouped by categories (MyMusic, MyPhotos, MyVideos, MyMovies, WebRadio, WebTV, Podcast, and RSS). You can can double-click on any of the media to open it in your default player,
Usage
Before you can connect to the Media server, you must configure the software. This is easily done in the Program Settings tab, and there are really only a few options. If you have several network cards (or any virtual ones), then these will be listed in a Network dropdown. Select the one you want the server to function on. By default the web port is 4001, so it shouldn’t interfere with any other web servers you may have on your PC. Here you can also change your PIN and real-time video encoding settings. By default video is encoded at 480×360 resolution with a 1200 kbit bitrate and 25 frames per second. You can customize the quality of the video by unchecking “Use default video settings”. You can then customize any of these options, up to 640×480 resolution, 1500kbit, and 30 fps. Take note that higher demands will require more processing power.
The software really likes to stay resident in memory. When you click the Close button, the Media Center server remains running. You can right-click the Media Center icon in your task bar and close it, but it somehow stayed resident. I was unable to re-open Media Center until I went into Task Manager and manually killed the mediacenter.exe and mediacenterlibrary.exe.
Connecting the Wii to the PC server is actually very easy. It is assumed that you’ve actually configured your Wii’s network, as you need to download the Wii Internet browser to connect. All you have to do is go to the Internet Channel and enter in a special URL that your new Media PC is hosting… By default the port is 4001, so you create a URL from the on-screen keyboard like “http://yourmediapc:4001/”.
I could not get any client to connect properly until I installed the software update from X-oom’s website. The software wipes out all of your old settings, but once you have things running again then any client can connect. I was even able to connect using my laptop’s web browser.
You can preview the Media Center client from your PC with the “Start Media Center” tab. Basically this opens up a local web instance (using your default web browser engine). If you required a PIN, then you can enter it with an onscreen keypad via your Wiimote. You are then presented with a page of statistics about your media.
The main Media Center screen looks very similar to the Playstation 3 or PSP’s “cross” menu. Main media categories are on the horizontal plane, and sub-items for each category are displayed vertically. You can use the Wiimote’s D-pad to navigate, or use the onscreen cursor to click icons. Because the resolution of the Wii is limited to standard NTSC (maximum resolution of 720×480), the interface’s inner screens can appear quite crowded, and only show a few options at once.
Clicking a major category will take you to that media’s player. Clicking on the MyMusic icon displays a screen where you can navigate by album art, or alphabetically. Media controls are displayed near the bottom. For some odd reason, I could not play music in the “album” mode, and instead had to click on Titles before any media would play (even after the software update).
Music is re-encoded from the server PC on-the-fly, which introduces some limitations. For one, you cannot jump directly to any point in the song: you must use the Fast Forward or Rewind buttons, which are pretty much useless because it works very slowly.
There are some nifty icons to add to your Favorites or add to a queue. You can also click on the Home or Back buttons to navigate to the previous screens. This really isn’t a good option for casually browsing your music, but great if you just want to queue up some tunes for the background.
I would also like to have seen a visualization option, but there are none. Your music is also cut off if you navigate away from the MyMusic screen, so you can’t listen to music while checking out other parts of the software.
Photos worked rather well. You are presented with a grid of thumbnails, and can zoom in or out to show more thumbnails on the screen at once. You can click on one and cycle through them or watch a slideshow. Transitions between photos are hardware-accelerated and look rather nice.
Playing videos pretty much has the same interface as navigating MyMusic. When you play a video, a small version appears in the middle of the screen. You can use your cursor to jump to any point in the video, but it takes a few seconds for the host PC to re-encode and stream the video.
You can make the video full-screen by clicking on the rolling video thumbnail, but it doesn’t truly fill the entire screen, and has black bars all around. If there only was a way to stretch the video to truly be fullscreen, then video would be much more watchable.
As mentioned previously, a huge list of podcasts are automatically added. You can narrow down the list by clicking the category buttons. Overall, the podcast feature is a pleasant surprise and worked rather well.
The interface works, but has very few frills. I did run into a few quirks when pressing the Home or Back button. For some odd reason after clicking on a new category I would be brought back to the screen I just moved away from. While this was slightly annoying it wasn’t the end of the world.
As far as client configuration goes, there are only a few things you can change. You can customize the background color between 10 different options, loop music or videos in your queue, and customize your photo slideshow.
The interface looks nice, but doesn’t really have a lot of frills you would expect from a “full blown” media server. There are some “free” Media Center software suites that come with PC video cards, but these pretty much just pass on the files without re-encoding them. So, if your client doesn’t support all of the codecs, then your media may not play.
Media Center XE gets around this problem by re-encoding your music and videos into Flash in real-time. On one hand you have amazing compatibility, and on the other there are several long pauses when skipping through music, and video streaming can stop abruptly if the host PC is too busy. Watching HDTV content is out of the question, as the Wii only supports standard definition resolution. While it is theoretically possible to resize HDTV content, the real-time nature of the software makes it impossible to re-process.
The software does work, however, and if you have a Wii connected to your TV, why not add some extra value to your console? There are a few things to keep in mind, though. You’ll need a PC on 24-7, so if you already have a Microsoft Home Server or Media Center PC serving video, then you’re set. Some people may not be so inclined to have a dedicated machine sucking up 300 watts of power all day just in case you want to watch downloaded videos. Linux-based NAS units are not compatible at all. You can still access them using this software, but not natively. You can map a network drive through a PC (which acts as a proxy), and then connect your Wii to the Proxy PC. Either way, you must still have a PC on all the time.
The software worked rather well after installing an online update (available here), although it is a “bare bones” solution. X-oom’s Media Center for Wii XE does have a few caveats, but makes accessing your online media relatively hassle-free, and is pretty much the only way to access your music and video library from the Wii.
This software can be difficult to find in stores. I’ve looked. The best way to get this software is right here.
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1 Comment
Actually you have another option that is free and quite easy to install. Check out http://www.orb.com. You need the interent channel installed on your Wii to use it. The music streaming works great and the video works but the quality isn't too good. Orb is cool because it works on anything with a web browser.