Nintendo Wii to Play DVDs, But Only in 2007

by Anton Shilov
11/15/2006 | 11:01 PM

Nintendo, a leading supplier of game consoles, will update its Wii game machine in 2007 so to enable playback of conventional DVD movies. While Nintendo will hardly impress anyone with DVD playback on a console in well-developed markets, the capability may be important to successfully enter the emerging markets, where the cost of a DVD player is considered as significant.

Nintendo plans to release DVD-playback enabled version of Wii in the latter half of 2007, according to Sonic Solutions, a software company that will power the DVD capability using its Sonic CinePlayer CE DVD Navigator software engine. Besides offering standard DVD functions and standards, CinePlayer CE DVD Navigator features advanced functions such as anamorphic widescreen video, motion menus, and multiple video angles.

It is unclear why Nintendo decided not to introduce DVD playback in the first version of its Wii console, which uses DVDs as video games media, as the cost of such functionality would be negligible, but would offer advantages for the console in Eastern Europe, where the game machine launches in early December.

Nintendo Wii console will feature IBM’s custom PowerPC architecture based microprocessor named Broadway clocked at 729MHz and code-named Hollywood chip with built-in graphics core, DSP and I/O features from ATI that will operate at 243MHz, earlier reports suggested. Nintendo Wii is expected to use 91MB of memory in total: 23MB of “main” 1T-SRAM, 64MB of “external” 1T-SRAM and 3MB texture buffer on the GPU. Nintendo’s Wii does not feature a hard disk drive, instead, it boasts with 512MB of flash memory, but the console will also have a card reader, which will allow installing more memory.