When we bought our Wii, I promised Mil that we could listen to TripleJ using it, as we haven’t had a radio in our lounge room for years, and she was missing it. So I set up Orb to play my iTunes library and TripleJ and Radio National¹ . But my computer had to be on for it to stream properly, and Orb was pretty useless for streaming video (the other reason I installed it), so eventually I gave up on it, and Mil went back to a music-free existence 😢

But determined not to be beaten, I found a nifty little MP3-playing SWF (flash program) that I could install on a webserver somewhere and point to the TripleJ MP3 stream. The player I used is created by neolao, and is very easy to use. I used their “generator” page to build the embed code I needed, and downloaded the player. I created a simple webpage that includes the embeded code (feel free to steal the “source”), and uploaded and pointed to the player hosted on my site. It points to the TripleJ stream, but could easily be adapted to play any other mp3 file or stream. The page is at http://nunnone.com/radio/ and I’ve added it to my Wii’s favourites menu so Mil can find it quickly when she wants some radio. It’s a very basic page, and the same site has many different versions of the player to do more - in fact if Radio National did an MP3 stream as well, I would create multi player so Mil could choose between the two stations.

I can even embed the stream right here, so enjoy!

Edit: removed - see update.

2009-09-06: Using the Homebrew channel to add radio

The biggest problem with the the Wii browser is that it can’t drop the stream, so the buffer fills up eventually and crashes. I tried a few MP3 flash players including one that suggested it could overcome this by playing two streams in sequence for five minutes each and dropping them one at a time to clear the buffer, but I couldn’t get any of them working reliably so I gave up for a while.

Then Lifehacker posted <a href=“http://lifehacker.com/5342733/hack-your-wii-for-homebrew-without-twilight-princess?skyline=true&s=x"&gt;this article about how to add the Homebrew channel to your Wii with just an SD card, and I gave it a shot. Then I downloaded the Homebrew Browser and copied it into an “Apps” folder I created on the same SD card. With that installed I downloaded the MPlayer Christmas Edition from the browser, and finally edited the menu.conf file in the Apps\mplayer_ce folder to add Internode’s stream to the Radio menu with the following line:

<e name="TripleJ" ok="loadlist 'http://media.on.net/radio/117.pls'"/>

Now I can play Triple J for free on my Wii, Mil is happy again, and I can also play DVDs, TV shows and music streamed form my PC!

Yay for lazyhacking!