Play a DVD on the WII

[Dwere134]

Hey, my girlfriend got a Wii, and wants to be able to play DVDs on it. I don't personally know how to "hack" it or if there is perhaps an attachment to enable you to play them.

I googled it, and found no such attachments, but found a bunch of "methods" that you can buy or download... didn't seem terribly safe.
If someone can detail a way for me to safely install a physical attachment, or describe a method which I can alter the WII enough to not damage the gaming experience, but also be able to play DVDs, I'd appreciate it.

Thanks.

Oh and I'm sorry if this should go into hardware, not gaming, I wasn't sure what I should do. Thanks again,
-David

[tremor77]

There is something called "Homebrew" that will allow for DVD playback on the Wii, but it is unsupported by Nintendo, and Wii Updates will try and uninstall homebrew if its there. There is also a dongle attachment that apparently will allow you to play DVD's. There is talk that a 2011 (this year) re-release of the console will have DVD support. If you want my opinion though, I bought a DVD player at wal-mart for $19.99, and my wife's laptop plays Blu-Ray which I can hook to my TV with HDMI connection. So i'd choose one of the latter options that farking around with the Wii playing DVD's... it's may be cheaper and less time consuming to just get a standalone player.

[sh3llz]

Tremor makes a good point. I hacked my Wii for homebrew applications and I can tell you from experience that if you don't know what you're doing, it can be very time consuming. Since this wasn't my first time hacking a console, it only took me a couple hours - and I was able to disable updates from Nintendo. However, if I had made a mistake in the early process, I would be short one Wii. If you do decide to hack your Wii however, it might interest you to know that most versions of the software will completely back up your Wii so you can return it's almost original state. Best of luck.

[mShred]

There's plenty of tutorials out there on how to get homebrew for the wii. I've done it, but personally i don't think it's worth it. It's nice for a lot of consoles, but for the wii, it just seemed like a waste of time. Just my opinion.