Author Topic: SPECIALS: Winamp Remote on Wii  (Read 5307 times)

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Offline WindyMan

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SPECIALS: Winamp Remote on Wii
« on: October 10, 2007, 06:43:03 PM »
Want to listen to MP3s or watch video on your Wii? The llama has the answer. Check out how it works here.
http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/specialArt.cfm?artid=14592

Winamp, the long-standing free media player for Windows, has just been updated to version 5.5 for Winamp's 10th anniversary. The update brings major changes to the player, including a new single-skin interface that sorts through albums, artists and songs, similar to iTunes.

What Wii owners will be most interested with in this new update is Winamp Remote, a new free service that allows you to access the music and video files stored on your computer from any Internet web browser in the world ... including the one on the Wii. Through the Wii Internet Channel's Opera web browser, you can take advantage of this streaming service. Winamp has gone so far as to design a special Winamp Remote web interface specifically for web browsers on television screens.

This makes Winamp the easiest way to get media from your computer to your Wii. All you need to do is download Winamp 5.5, install the player and the Winamp Remote add-on to your Windows-based PC and create a Winamp account. After that, you can access the Winamp Remote website from the Opera browser in the Wii, input your login information (you can use a keyboard for this now, thanks to the recent Internet Channel update), and have streaming access to all the music and video on your computer, or at least the folders on your computer that you specified as shareable in the Winamp Remote settings.

There are a variety of ways to search through and sort your music. You can choose to search through music by albums (complete with album art) or artists. You can also search by typing the name of the file or song via a search box. Basically, you have all the sorting and searching power on your Wii as you would as if you were using Winamp at your computer.

The playing interface is similar to that of YouTube. It's a flash player that streams in a selected file, and the album art for that music file (if there is one) will show up in the video pane while the music plays. Off to the side there is a banner ad, but it's a small annoyance that can be overlooked given the service to do this is totally free. You'll be able to control the volume level, pause, skip tracks forward or backward or view file information. From what I've sampled on from my computer, the audio quality playing the music over the Internet and through the Wii's browser sounds pretty similar to the speakers on my computer. That's impressive.

You can even stream video from your computer to your Wii via the Internet. Again, just like YouTube, selecting a video from one of your folders will begin a streaming playback via a flash player, although it will begin playing immediately rather than buffering a little bit to ensure a smooth playback. With some of my smaller video files, the audio and video playback was amazingly good. When I tried to stream some of my larger files, though, the playback was choppy, though still acceptably watchable. The audio was also a little ragged, but not to the point where it would ruin it.

Of course, since the files you are streaming to the Wii are located on your computer, and these files must be routed through Winamp Remote via the Internet to your Wii browser, the quality you'll ultimately get by using this method to play media on your Wii totally depends on the upload speed of your Internet connection. I achieved the above results with a decently fast upload speed on a cable Internet line. If you have a DSL connection with better upload speeds, you'll likely get better performance, especially with the streaming video.

There are other neat things the Winamp Remote interface provides that may make it worth your while to try it out. Even if you can't stream things to your Wii over your Internet connection, you may be able to do so on your friend's Wii. Even on a different Wii browser (or any computer, for that matter), all you would need to do is login with your Winamp account information and you'll have access to the media on your computer, even if it's miles away. And if you and a friend both have Winamp Remote accounts, you'll be able to listen to each other's music—Winamp has made it possible for friends to share their music and video libraries with each other. If you have more Winamp friends, you'll have more media available to you, all accessible on your Wii through the console's Internet browser.

Remember, all of this is totally free, very easy to use, and takes only minutes to setup. If this sounds like something you'd be interested in, you can get all the details over at the Winamp and Winamp Remote websites.
Steven "WindyMan" Rodriguez
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Offline IceCold

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RE: SPECIALS: Winamp Remote on Wii
« Reply #1 on: October 10, 2007, 06:51:02 PM »
Great special - so this works just like Orb does, eh? I have that, and my results have been basically the same as yours. Long video files take quite a while to buffer, and you can't skip to anywhere in the middle. Short video files and audio files are just fine. The video quality is serviceable - about as good as you can expect for low-quality flash.

I was hoping that NWR would do a review of the X-OOM media streamer for Wii. It's pretty pricey, but if it's actual streaming instead of flash compression, it would be nice to see how well it works.

Any chance of this?  
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Offline Shift Key

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RE:SPECIALS: Winamp Remote on Wii
« Reply #2 on: October 10, 2007, 11:21:39 PM »
Quote

Originally posted by: WindyMan
You can even stream video from your computer to your Wii via the Internet.


Forget the internet, I want to stream stuff across my network. If I get it working I'll post a nice how-to.


Offline ShyGuy

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RE: SPECIALS: Winamp Remote on Wii
« Reply #3 on: October 10, 2007, 11:36:03 PM »
As long as you setup the media server to accessible on a local IP I don't think it would be a problem.

Offline Shift Key

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RE:SPECIALS: Winamp Remote on Wii
« Reply #4 on: October 10, 2007, 11:41:24 PM »
Quote

Originally posted by: ShyGuy
As long as you setup the media server to accessible on a local IP I don't think it would be a problem.


Yeah, that's what I figure. But by the sounds of it there's a UI associated with it (yes, its an Orb-style version of Winamp) and I haven't really had a look at what it offers.

Stay tuned.

EDIT: Ew, signup on install. Not a fan.

Offline bubicus

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RE: SPECIALS: Winamp Remote on Wii
« Reply #5 on: October 11, 2007, 06:14:06 PM »
I installed it and set it up pretty easily. I was surprised to find out that it wasn't a notable drain on CPU usage (at least with my configuration). Right now I'm running Firefox, X3 Reunion (a rather graphics-intensive game) in a window, and the Orb server (using my Wii to listen to the music), and my CPU usage is only around 75%, with Orb using up about 12% and X3 about 57%.

I really like how I can use it with almost anything that has browser and Flash support. It means I can go to friends' homes, and we can all listen together to my far-superior playlists! Or I can listen to my own music at work without having to copy the music to another device. My only concern is security. I hate having an opening into my computer.






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Offline Sabe002

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RE:SPECIALS: Winamp Remote on Wii
« Reply #6 on: October 21, 2007, 12:59:59 PM »
Does anyone know if it works with the DS and the Internet Browser?
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