Wii Media Playback Impressions
That shouldn't come as a great surprise to anyone, but the lack of seemingly basic features is still a bit of a let down.
Photo Channel: The heart of multimedia on the Wii is the Photo Channel. Here you can view photos and pictures off of an SD card and even play around with both a little.
According to the manual, the Wii can play Jpegs, QuickTime videos and MP3s. Jpegs are limited to no larger than 8,192 by 8,192.
When you start up the channel you're asked if you want to view photos from an SD card or from your Wii's Message Board. If you select SD card the Wii scans the card and all of its subfolders and then automatically displays thumbnails of both images and supported video up on the the screen in a sort of big collage. Thumbnails of video are shown with a little filmstrip icon on them.
You can use the + and - on the remote to increase or decrease the size of the thumbnails and the Wii can show up to 1,000 images off of one SD.
There are several ways to watch your stuff. You can quickly flick through both pictures and movies with the D-pad or you can start a slide show.
While viewing the images one a time, the Wii allows you to zoom in or out, post them to your console's message board or even play with them.
When you click on the Fun button it opens up a menu that allows you to draw on your images. You can also apply four different filters, copy chunks of the photo for pasting or slap stamps on the images.
One of the coolest features in the Photo Channel is the ability to turn an image or a movie into one of those slide puzzles. That's right you can do this with a moving video as well. Kinda cool.
You can also create slideshows with your images. There are several rudimentary options you can select to change the way the images are presented, but nothing amazing. It's here that you also have the ability to listen to MP3s.
From what I've seen so far, and I did a ton of searching, the absolute only way you can listen to MP3s right now is in a slideshow. There doesn't appear to be a separate music player or anyway to have it inserted into games. At least not yet.
You can both view and send photos to the Wii's Message Board. And once in the message board those photos can be sent to friends.
The photo browser and video browser is a breeze to use, but the Wii's inability to use the images, video or music anywhere else sorta makes you wonder why they bothered to include it. I sure hope a future update will add at least a simple music player and perhaps a way to customize your Wii's menu with personal images. Brian Crecente
http://www.kotaku.com/gaming/wii/wii-media-playback-impressions-214194.php
