For a while I've had an old Windows XP desktop (PIII 1GHz with TV out card) sitting next to the TV for playback of Music, Video and Photo's. I tried a number of different kinds of Media Center software but settled on Yahoo! Go. It worked fairly well, but with only a regular mouse it wasn't that user friendly. Plus my wife was not that excited to have a PC in the living room. So it wasn't long after getting a Wii that I tried to figure out how to use it instead.

Nintendo does not provide any kind of Media Center features on the Wii so people have become a little creative. There are a number of solutions that people have come up with. There are 5 options here. None of those appealed to me so I went with Orb.

Orb allows you to stream your media anywhere via it's web interface. You install it on a PC tell it where your media is and that PC acts as a server that you can access from pretty much any web browser. You can download a Wii web browser (Opera) from the Wii Shop Channel for $5. Orb will recognize the Wii browser and give you a nice looking interface that works well on the Wii. Orb on a Wii.

Now I can browse my Music, Photo's and Internet Radio from the Wii. There is some Video support but only Flash movies. But I have a much nicer interface that I can operate using the Wiimote and it boots up much faster than the PC.

You can also add Sirius satellite radio streams to Orb which are also usable from the Wii. This guide shows you how to do it for an iPhone. But the setup in Orb is the same whether your using an iPhone, Wii or any other web browsing device.