Can You Do More Than Play Games On Your Wii?

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These days, every gaming system in your living room better be able to do more than just play video games if it’s going to earn its place next to your TV.

Yeah? Well my prototype Wii 3600 Turbo Nutter 4×4 console wakes me up in the morning, makes my breakfast, fetches the paper, warms the car up for me and does all the housework while I’m at work.

When it comes to expanding your home theater beyond gaming, the Wii has always been a bit light on functionality. The best thing it’s got going for it is the excellent Opera web browser, but web browsing with the Wii remote is still a bit clunky.

Yes it’s true enough. The Wii definitely doesn’t impress in this area. The Opera Web browser is a nifty little bit of software but unfortunately many Web site developers do not code their web sites with Opera in mind. Consequently you’ll probably find lots of web sites which do not display properly in Opera unfortunately. This is not a problem with Opera but is a side effect of the huge market dominance of Microsoft and Internet Explorer.

Luckily, using that very same browser, you can turn your Wii into a full-fledged media center with the freeware Windows application Orb.

I was quite excited about this when I heard the news and I wasted no time in giving Orb a good workout. Unfortunately I found that the video quality was fairly poor and I could not actually watch it for long. Another real annoyance was the fact that I couldn’t seem to get a video to play all the way through without it stuttering and buffering many times during playback.

Source: lifehacker