Homebrew community brings DVD playback to Wii, but who cares?

By Stephen Munn | August 16, 2008

Let me give you a little bit of a rundown of what’s hooked up to my TV right now. There’s my cable box, my Wii, my PS3, and my DVD player. When Nintendo announced their console, they claimed it would have DVD playback support via an optional add-on, something they eventually decided not to do. What happened was that Nintendo apparently couldn’t negotiate a low enough price for the royalty fees to Toshiba or whoever handles the rights to DVD playback, figured everyone already had a DVD player anyway, and decided to save money.

It’s been clear to me that all it would take is a DVD playback channel to play movies, but until now the only solution was a hardware mod (which voided your warranty and in my case would likely break the Wii) that offered this feature. Now the homebrew thing on Wii is in full swing, and the latest available homebrew thingy is, you guessed it, a DVD playback channel.

In addition to the fact that this is a pretty worthless function (I think my toaster can play DVDs), this likely puts Nintendo in a really troubling position. Now that people can use this easy mod to play DVDs on the console, I imagine Nintendo will be forced to pay those royalty fees anyway. Does this mean they’ll go ahead and release their own version of the DVD playback channel and price it to cover the fee each console will incur? That would be the smart solution… either that, or just pretend this hasn’t happened and hope nobody hears about it. More likely, they’ll spend weeks writing code to patch our firmware to block the software, and 24 hours later it will be cracked again.

Source: TehSkeen via Engadget