Media Centre for Wii
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/media-centre-for-wii-wii-users-now...
www.X-OOM.com

The measuring stick has to be XBMC

I've used Xbox Media Centre (XBMC) before and it's a pretty wonderful Media Centre Client. It's very easy to set up and use. It has plenty of nice little features.

You can:
stream archived (e.g. *.rar) content
stream shoutcast stations
view news feeds
mount DVD ISOs (e.g. *.bin *.cue)
to name a few

So when I first heard about Xoom I thought, this is going to have an awful lot to live up to. Looking through the feature list Xoom did look pretty impressive.

Thoughts

Initially I wondered, am I going to have to put a disc in every time I want to use Xoom? Thankfully not.

"Then, simply select the Wii’s Internet Channel, typing in the web address and pass code provided, to navigate the simple menus and browse the streamed files."

This means my lazy ass gets to stay connected to the sofa while I prepare to watch streamed video. Nice. Previous consoles like the Xbox had to be pretty heavily modified before you could get the benefit of being able to turn it on remotely. Advantage Xoom.

So my options are: windows, windows or windows?

"Wii™ including web browser and internet access, PC including Windows 2000/XP/ Vista and internet access, CPU 1.5 GHz, 512 MB of RAM, screen resolution of 1024 x 768 or higher, 500 MB of free disk space for installation. A LAN or WLAN."

Unfortunately this means your media server (the PC) is going to have to be a Windows box. Advantage XBMC. With XBMC not only can I use a variety of file sharing options (e.g. smb / samba ) but more importantly it's not tied down to a particular operating system. I know we Linux users are hardly abundant. I know most people won't care but for me it's a big selling point.

You want me to add each and every file!?

"After installing the software on the PC, use the File Wizard to add files to the Media Centre"

If you have to individually add files to your collection, that's pretty weak. Why does it not just use a "share these folders" option. Of course it doesn't really say either way but it does not look good.

At first glance I would say this could be a nice product but I'm not sure it's really for me. I would like to review it and find out one way or the other. Or maybe one of our readers would like to?

www.X-OOM.com