Want to listen to MP3s or watch video on your Wii?

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

What Wii owners will be most concerned with in this new update is Winamp Remote, a fresh free service that lets 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 my lovely console, Wii. Through the Wii Internet Channel's Opera web browser, you able to obtain 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 creates Winamp the easiest way to get media from your computer to our Nintendo Wii. All you require to do is download Winamp 5.5 (or higher), install the player and the Winamp Remote add-on to your Windows-based PC and make a Winamp account. After that, you able to 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 our computer, or at least the folders on our computer that you particular as shareable in the Winamp Remote settings.

There are a diversity of ways to search through and sort your music. You can decide 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. Mostly, you have all the sorting and searching power on your Wii as you would as if you were using Winamp at your computer. That’s wonderful!

The playing interface is comparable 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 whereas the music plays. Off to the side there is a banner ad, but it's a small infuriation that can be unnoticed given the service to do this is totally free. You'll be capable to manage the volume level, pause, skip tracks forward or backward or view file information. From what I've sampled on from my computer, the audio excellence playing the music over the Internet and through the Wii's browser sounds pretty similar to the speakers on my computer. That's remarkable.

You able to even stream video from your computer to your Wii via the Internet. Once more, just like YouTube, picking a video from one of your folders will start a streaming playback via a flash player, even though it will begin playing instantly rather than buffering a little bit to make sure a smooth playback. With some of my smaller video files, the audio and video playback was incredibly high-quality. When I attempted to stream some of my larger files, though, the playback was choppy, though still tolerably watchable. The audio was also a little tattered, but not to the point where it would mess up it.

Obviously, since the files you are streaming to the Wii are placed on your computer, and these files must be routed throughout Winamp Remote via the Internet to your Wii browser, the quality you'll eventually get by using this process to play media on your Wii fully depends on the upload speed of your Internet connection. I attained the above outcome with a courteously fast upload speed on a cable Internet line. If you have a DSL connection with better upload speeds, you'll likely acquire better performance, particularly with the streaming video.

There are other orderly 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 capable to do so on your friend's Wii. Even on a different Wii browser (or any computer, for that matter), all you would require 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 completed it possible for friends to distribute their music and video libraries with each other. If you have more Winamp friends, you'll have more media accessible to you, all available on your Wii through the console's Internet browser.

For your attention, all of this is totally free, very simple to use, and takes only minutes to setup. If this sounds like a little you'd be interested in, you able to get all the particulars over at the

Winamp and Winamp Remote websites.