The Wii Internet Channel: Google Reader and your MP3s!

Okay, this week I have a lot to write about!

My plan was to first write a entry about why I am now using Google Reader even though I had previously decided not to. But then, during last week, I saw this: Google Reader has been optimised for the Wii!

Google Reader on the Wii is pretty nice. (I’ll write about why I like Google Reader another time). The layout is done well, so it easier to read feeds on the TV. The “2″ button pulls up the list of your subscriptions, which is very handy, except occasionally the Wii gets confused and thinks the 2 button is the shortcut to go to “column view” and it gets hard to switch back. The other bugbear is that if you visit a site outside of Google Reader and you go back, then when you bring up your subscriptions with the 2 button, it’s blank! It’s not substitute for a PC based browser but for a quick fix during a TV ad break, it’s nice.

In general, I’m not a big fan of the Internet Wii Channel. I have the Internet Browser for the DS and for a handheld that little browser is great. The Internet Channel on the Wii is built using the same technology and concepts it appears. On the Wii, all Internet pages have a fixed width so you can move around the screen, much like the DS Internet Browser where you can view webpages in full as well as in a handheld mode. But I find it annoying on the Wii. The Wii remote is not as precise as the DS styles. It’s all very awkward and makes reading webpages, designed for a PC browser, painful. Imagine a blog with posts to the right of the page. You have to move the screen over to read them, but you might end up moving a little too far and missing the first few letters of each line. It makes reading anything but a plain webpage with large font and big margins, uncomfortable.

But the Internet Wii Channel has one really useful feature. Video. Go to YouTube, watch the clip in full screen! But there is a catch here. The Flash version installed is an old version. I’ve tried other video sites and they don’t work and you can’t install the latest version of Flash. However there is still a very powerful use of this feature.

This weekend, I discovered Orb, which has been optimised for the Wii! You just install an app on your PC, create an account and then on the Wii, using the Internet Channel, open your Orb account and then you can watch any videos on your PC and listen to your MP3 collection! Surprisingly simple to set up if your using Windows XP.

I did have to do one change to get good video quality though. The Orb webpage performs a “speed test” before streaming video and for some reason it was getting dismal speeds. The video stream then was very low quality (because it thought it was a low speed connection). I set a fixed speed of 1meg and the video stream became very watchable. Occasionally blocks and artifacts when too much was happening on screen but otherwise very good. BTW you can stream your DivX videos and they’ll play on the Wii.

As far as I understand how Orb works, it’s just a web interface that give you a list of the media on your PC. You can configure where Orb looks for content on your PC. When you open Orb webpage and open some media, it actually creates a connection between your PC and where your streaming the content, not via the Orb servers. Which means when I use my Wii to listen to my MP3s, they are streamed only across my wireless LAN, not the Internet.

I don’t understand how Orb makes money. It’s a free service. I haven’t seen any ads yet or mentions of paid subscription. It simply works.  So now I can stream music and video to my TV from my PC. Bloody great. My fandom for the Wii continues…

Why I’m not ready to move to Google Reader yet…

What RSS reader do you use?

I’ve been using Bloglines for quite a while, long before Google Reader hit the scene. I have approximately over 80 RSS feeds I read daily. Not a big number I grant you. I know Bloglines is not perfect (it uses frames FFS!) but it does nearly everything I need, except for one thing that has been bugging me for a while.

I have a number of feeds that fill up quite regularly but when I open them in Bloglines, it marks them all as read, before I’ve even seen the headlines of all the items and if it takes me 10 minutes to read through all the items, it’s kind of annoying if I don’t read through all the items at that time. I have to look at all items in the last “hour” and try to remember which ones I hadn’t read. But Google Reader, using all that Web2.0-ajax-funky-shit, will only mark an item in a feed read as you scroll past it! With Google Reader, I could just pop into one of these big feeds and read as much as I want and not miss anything!

Google Reader is much smoother and nice-looking. No frames for a start. But when I first tried Google Reader, it didn’t work in Opera so therefore it was an instant no-no. But now it does. So I went and imported my latest subscriptions. Easy peasy. But then I thought, if I’m going to start using a new tool I might as well organise my feeds, put them in the right folders, delete the ones I never read etc. Removing feeds easy. But I couldn’t rename a folder! I had to delete it and recreate it. Arg! Also, in one place tags were called folders and you can browse around your feeds using them, in another they are purely tags you have to add tags to feeds instead of adding feeds to tag/folders.

Bloglines has a nice drag and drop interface where you can drop feeds in the folders you want. Okay, so it’s not any more efficient than Google Reader or using a text editor, but it’s visual and augments the organisation process. With Google Reader, you have to select the feeds from a list of all the feeds. Yes tags are more powerful, but there seems to be a bit of drawback on the user-interface for managing them. You can filter but it just didn’t feel easy. I found it would be easier and quicker to modify the exported opml file from Bloglines with a text editor than try and use this interface. It was disappointing. Yes, I’m lazy. I could do all these modifications. But Bloglines works fine for me right now. I know the guys at Google will improve the Google Reader interface in time so I’ll just wait and see.