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Will a Wii play DVDs?
Peter Principle
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Will a Wii straight out of the box play dvds? If not, is there an aftermarket adaptor like with the original Xbox that will give it that function?
"A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business." - Eric Hoffer, _The True Believer_
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Long Answer: Not without the Homebrew Channel, which is not the domain of this forum, and in any case, playing DVD movies with it will over time kill your Wii's disc drive.
So back to the reasonable answer: Nope.
Is the Wii somehow different in this regard from the Xbox?
Honestly, it's a feature that I thought would make a great add-on channel, like Opera. But clearly the thing just wasn't designed with it in mind.
The Wii disc drive is...Odd. It's basically built in such a fashion to read data in bursts very well, and to not stream data well at all.
You don't read a DVD in bursts, you stream it, perhaps into a cache.
The primary issue at heart here is that to play a DVD, Nintendo would have to pay licensing fees to the DVD Forum. Since the Wii was trying to meet as low a price point as possible (ATI graphics, anyone?) it chose to not go that route. They have "announced" that they are releasing a DVD-compatible Wii. However, this was done in 2007, and then delayed indefinitely as they worked to address the fact that people STILL (as in present day) can not expect to walk into a store and pick up a Wii.
PSN: TheScrublet
I don't know if you meant we can't talk about homebrew, or that HA isn't he place for it. Just to cover the bases, home brew is a legitimate thing thaat we can talk about.
Also, the Wii cannot meet the DVD licensing requirements, if memory serves. I believe it requires optical audio out.
Well, it's always nice not to have too much clutter around the living room if you can easily avoid it. But that doesn't look like the case here. Looks like I'll need to scrounge some y-splitters.