Question of the Day: Stream Netflix Video Via Wii?

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Today’s question was lifted straight from the ZNF comments. And I promise this will be the very last mention of Netflix movie downloads for quite some time. In regards to getting Netflix content onto a television screen (rather than a PC monitor), Josh wondered:

Couldn’t you do this on a Wii?

I don’t have a Wii (yet), so I again enlisted the help of my buddy Matt…

I tried to stream a movie through the trial version of Wii’s beta Opera browser (Internet Channel), but to no avail. I thought I could get a movie up and running on a television in front of a couch, but video isn’t enabled… at least for now. Regular sites/content/pics work surprisingly well, but no video. It will be interesting to see if we’ll be able to get video content when the final pay version is available this spring. I’ll keep you posted…and will look around a little more on this.

I assume this basically comes down to the use of Microsoft’s Windows Media DRM to protect content. By way of comparison, at least one person has been able to view other video through the Nintendo Wii using Opera and Orb — though it’s not possible to judge quality (or audio/video sync) from a low-res YouTube demo.

5 thoughts on “Question of the Day: Stream Netflix Video Via Wii?”

  1. Just for another data point, I tried to get it running through my Xbox 360/XP Media Center 2005 combination using the MCEBrowser plug-in and also couldn’t get the video to run. I actually got the red Netflix screen with the crawling status bar, but as soon as it hit 100% some sort of video error showed up. I didn’t bother to get the full text.

  2. You can also watch YouTube videos on the Wii. If you click the fullscreen button on YT, it actually looks pretty decent and fills the entire screen (minus the browser toolbar at the bottom).

  5. You can toggle the browser toolbar on and off (I can’t remember if you press 1 or 2 on the Wiimote) to get the true fullscreen experience from YouTube.

  6. if u have zelda orcana of time,then google “homebrew chanel for the wii” then load it onto an sd card and use it as wii internet…….duuuuuuuuuuh?!?!?!?!

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