X-OOM Media Center
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Pictures and videos are shown as icons while music is listed by the artists, titles and such just like the PlayStation 3 layout which is very easy to use. The library setup is easy to find things and has the usual play, stop and other buttons to control the music, video and such. For streaming things like video and music there are no problems with buffering and pausing while the system loads as it can hold plenty in memory to play a full video clip of ten to fifteen minutes without any buffering pauses.
This however is not true of full length movies that will start to have frame rate issues from lack of buffering memory or some other problem. I checked this out on both of my computers and found the X-OOM Media Centre just not able to handle full length movies streamed to the Wii console. This really did not surprise me as the system is just not built to handle such large file sizes and jobs like this were not built into the hardware.
The X-OOM does handle music and videos, podcasts and RSS feeds without problems and works very well with any type of file I threw at it. From the regular and popular formats such as MP3, JPG and WMV to the full range that the program can handle I had no problems finding and playing files as long as they were smaller, under 100 megabytes or so.
I did play some larger files like 20 to 80 megabytes of videos like shuttle launches from NASA and had no problems but somewhere around a gigabyte the problems creep in. For full length movies in the gigabytes the streaming just cannot keep up without some kind of problems like frame rate loss and pauses while playing. It just makes these larger files like full length movies unwatchable but for music and videos I had no problems streaming files from my computers.
The X-OOM Media Centre for the Wii works very well and played better than I expected for the console system. I was more surprised that the system itself could handle the streaming and not have more pauses and frame rate problems when handling larger files. The only thing you should really not expect out of the Media Centre for Wii is being able to stream a full length movie.
You do need to make sure you have internet connection with the Wii console before purchasing the X-OOM system as you need at least the ability to connect to a website. To check this you simply try to go into your internet from the Wii main menu and see if you have a menu page to connect to the internet. This ability does cost 500 points to gain access to the internet using an Opera based internet program as well as having the hardware to connect your Wii to the internet.
You can have either a direct LAN connection using a USB adapter or connect wirelessly using a router with wireless internet to connect your Wii to the internet. This kind of goes along with having two ways for the Media Centre to connect to your computer using the direct method of an IP address or the X-OOM website. Using an IP address means your Media Centre connection goes from your PC directly to your Wii console without going out over the internet and is how I would set this system up if I was going to be using it permanently.
The X-OOM Media Centre for the Wii XE is a great product and a really easy one to use if you want streaming media form your PC to your Wii system. To stream media such as music and videos directly to your television you can simply connect the Wii console to your home computer through a network connection and watch or listen to any content on your computer.