WiiMC - Using Wii Media Centre with the LinkStation

=Wii Media Centre (WiiMC)=

WiiMC (Wii Media Centre) is is a free and open source media player for the Wii home video game console. WiiMC uses MPlayer to play media files, and is considered Wii homebrew.


 * Many Audio and Video codecs are supported.
 * DVD playback is possible with DVD menu support, however newer Wiis have incompatible drives.
 * Picture viewing is supported

WiiMC allows media to be read locally from the device itself through FAT32/NTFS from SD and USB 2.0 or via local Network playback via Samba, HTTP, and FTP. On-line media support, including SHOUTcast, YouTube, and Navi-X is also supported.

The Wii hardware provides limitations as to the media playback capabilities of WiiMC. The console is not capable of Audio CD playback. Video playback is limited by the Wii's hardware to 480p or 576i. Multichannel sound (5.1) is not possible as the Wii hardware has only two analogue audio output channels (2.0)

=Install WiiMC=

Setup The Homebrew Channel
This is a step-by-step guide of how to install the Homebrew Channel on your Wii console :

http://wiibrew.org/wiki/Homebrew_setup

Install the Homebrew Browser
Use this guide to install the Homebrew Browser :

http://wiibrew.org/wiki/Homebrew_Browser

Setup WiiMC
You can then use the Homebrew Browser to install the WiiMC application

http://wiibrew.org/wiki/WiiMC

Once you've set it up, you can nose around and see what it can do, this is a pretty good video guide to setting up the WiiMC. nA3XOwbT_9I

=Configuring File Shares=

On the Wii
Setting up a Samba Share:


 * 1) For this you need to know your Linkstation's ip address
 * 2) Make sure you know the name of the samba share you setup
 * 3) Open WiiMC and go to "Settings"...Its to the right of the screen. Click "Network" down the bottom. Click "Add SMB Share"
 * 4) Using the details you grabbed before enter the name of the folder you are sharing (e.g., movies, music) and give it a "display name". They can be the same. Add your ipaddress, username and password.

On the Linkstation
For some reason the newest version doesn't work well with older versions of Samba, this probably has something to do with UTF-8 support. WiiMC uses a purpose built Samba implementation called Tinysmb which was originally designed for the GameCube.

You can use an older version of WiiMC with the default older version of samba, or you can upgrade Samba using debian backports to use with the newest version of WiiMC.

With Samba 3.2.5 and WiiMC v1.04
Samba 3.2.5 is now Debian Lenny's included package, use this with WiiMC v1.04. There is still some instability with Samba shares that have directories with alot of files/directories, it just seems to cause the whole system to crash. Also USB media doesn't work in this version well at all.

With Samba 3.4.8 and WiiMC v1.09+
Samba 3.4.8 is now in Debian Lenny's backports repository, you can use this with the newest version of WiiMC. . This has pretty good stability for large directories, and of course USB media works well in this release. To enable backports you need to do the following:

deb http://www.backports.org/debian lenny-backports main contrib non-free to your /etc/apt/sources.list.
 * 1. Add this line:
 * 2. Run:  apt-get update 
 * 3. Run:  apt-get -t lenny-backports install samba 

=References=