I am a little late to the party on this one, but I just had to air out my frustration and joy that the Wii finally has some DVD playback abilities. Last week one of the hot topics around the console news machine was the homebrew scene surrounding the Wii finally got the console to play DVDs using the open source media player “MPlayer.” The process is extremely easy getting the code up and running on your Wii and Nintendo Wii Fan Boy as a nice photo tutorial on the process.

While I am super excited that the Wii finally has a way to playback DVDs, I am super annoyed at Nintendo for leaving this extremely nice feature out. It is now apparent that adding DVD functionality is simple a software “update” rather than an actual hardware ability. While I might not have a source to quote on this, I remember Nintendo stating that adding DVD playback to the console originally would boost the price because of hardware needed. I can now confidently say “Bull shit.” Nintendo, please just give us official playback, I mean it can come in a firmware update and we can all be happy campers.

I am sure a huge question on your mind right now is if Polyvector and I will hack our Wii. The answer is: Not exactly sure yet. We don’t currently have a SD card the Wii can read. I have an SDHC card for my Casio Exlim, and unfortunately the Wii cannot read those yet. Nintendo has thought about adding support for reading these and I would rather not have to buy another SD card (I know they are cheap), just to hack my Wii for a functionality it should already have. If we do happen to take on this hack, I will post a tutorial or some kind of followup on how it went.