New add-ons turn Wii into a media center

[BenKenobi88]

People, I've tried Orb.

1) The Wii has 512 mb of memory, and obviously much less with more VC titles, saved content from games such as Brawl, etc...you're working on a very low MB number, and if you stream a high quality video from your PC, you're going to be working with a very small buffer zone, AKA possible pausing to buffer occasionally or even worse, your Wii not allowing you to continue because you used up the memory. You'd have to reload the page to continue.

2) The 3 different videos I tried (a 700 mb Bourne Identity DVD rip, a 200 mb video I recorded of Mario Strikers, and a 10 mb game trailer) were all somewhat choppy, Bourne Identity was the worst I'd say though. I'm guessing when going from high quality to lower flash quality, you lose way too much as well as the Wii's processor possibly not being able to play the video smoothly.

Maybe it's better now, that was like half a year ago, but there are limitations and unless you put Linux or something on the Wii, I have yet to see a good video streaming option with better quality than Youtube. Another problem is the Wii only supports Flash 7, not 8 and 9, because Adobe sucks at sending dev kits or whatever to companies. I think PS3 also only has 7, but I'm not sure on that.

The plus side is Orb is great for music and pictures. I wanted to let my friends hear a cool song I found, so we stopped playing Brawl, went to Orb on the Wii browser and listened to it in less than a minute.