Media Centre For Wii XE (PC software) - Wii Review

Purchasing Information

Review

X-OOM software were kind enough to send me a review copy of their brand new Wii Media Centre software for pc last week so I thought I’d give it a proper look over and tell you what I thought of it. First though I should explain what the software does...X-OOM’s media Centre for Wii lets you access and stream content from your pc to the Wii via LAN or WLAN (Local network or Wireless Local Network), allowing you to view/listen/watch it on your TV.

The software comes in a nice cardboard case with a sturdy cardboard box containing the PC software CD and a 48 page English manual. The basic installation took 3 minutes on my test system. When you first launch the software you are asked to fill in your registration details, frustratingly I found that this registration box appears every time instead of just the initial use. 

Next you are asked to enter a PIN number; this is a small layer of security that only allows the Wii to access the files on your PC. After this the program asks if you would like it to scan selected folders or your whole pc for media suitable for sharing to the Wii. Here you will need to manually choose the folders such as My Music or My Pictures, you can also add folders containing video, WebTV RSS feeds and even podcasts. I added my music folder and some other bits and hit next, the software then scanned the folders for everything compatible and built its own virtual library.

This took a little while as I have a fairly big collection of music on my hard drive. When that is done you can press Start Media Centre and now it’s time to head over to your Wii. By default the software will act as an IP server, meaning it will contact the XOOM servers and tell your Wii where your PC is when you want to access PC files, this could be considered a privacy issue but they say they do not collect any personal information etc.


Apart from that the obvious downside would be that if their server went down or was switched off, your files would instantly become inaccessible. I recommend you skip this and connect to your home network manually via the 192.xxx address, at least this way you are sure of your privacy and that the software will always work, though once again for non technical users this would be troublesome.

You can now head either to the X-oom WiiConnect website (using the Wii Internet Channel) or use the direct IP address, either way fingers crossed you should now see a blue screen and keypad, here you enter your PIN. Now you should be able to use the media library system on the Wii and look through the various categories and choose something to play. Looking through the library is fairly straightforward and everything loads pretty quickly, sometimes you’ll see the loading circle if you have a lot of files to list, but that normally disappears quite quickly.

Good things aside I am a bit worried that CRT users may encounter screen burn if the media library is left on screen for too long, as the image is very stationary is seems more suited for LCD televisions. One other small bug I seemed to encounter was that the software told me that there was an updated version I could download from the software company, when I clicked OK to download I just got an error message.
Annoying...but not a big deal in the scheme of things, this version was running fine and I couldn’t be bothered to email customer services about the issue.

Oh and another thing, the included help file seems to be in Italian and not English....whoops! And that’s about it, the software apart from a few bugs and technical issues I mentioned works as described. The PC and Wii interfaces are fairly straightforward and the list of media to stream to the Wii is great, I don’t think it’s quite as easy to use as suggested on the box, I think PC novices may have a bit of trouble, but hopefully they know of someone (probably a 10 year old child) who can help them out.

I was very pleased to see that I didn’t need to open or forward any ports on my router by default as this another technical hassle that baffles a lot of users, though if you have a software firewall you may need to allow the X-OOM software to have outbound connections. Sound and picture quality is what you would expect on a TV, the resolution is far less than that of your pc monitor (this software doesn't' output in HD either), but things look good enough. All in all, if you do have a need to view media through your Wii then this is a good solution, it’s not perfect but works well enough and has a modern media centre look to it.

At an RRP of £29.99 this is terribly overpriced, especially considering the bugs. If you can find it for around £10-£15 then I would say it is fair value, however I can’t not tell you that there are free open source alternatives on the Internet if you know where to look.

** Security note, this software is bundled with an out of date version of the Adobe Flash Player ActiveX, I recommend removing the old OCX file and replacing it with the latest one for maximum pc security**

Minimum System Requirements: Nintendo Wii with Internet Access (wireless or Ethernet) and Opera Internet Channel (sold separately) . Windows PC (2000/XP/Vista) with Internet Access Router/Wireless Router. 700 MHz CPU. 256MB Ram. 200MB Hard disk space.

Test System: Nintendo Wii with wireless internet Access. Netgear DG834G router with WPA2 encryption. Windows Vista. 1.5GB of Ram. 2.4GHz CPU.

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About Russ Greeno