The Nintendo Wii can play movies taken with most digital cameras without additional software. But if you have existing movies that were compressed in a format that the Wii does not understand, you can use Wii Transfer to convert those movies to play in the Wii’s Photo Channel.

In order to get your movies onto the Wii you will need an SD card writer for Wii Transfer to copy the movie files to. Once the movie has been converted and saved on the SD card, you insert the SD card into the Wii and use the Photo Channel to browse and play your movies.

Wii Media Center X is a free multimedia server developed by Red Kawa. It allows you to stream certain types of pictures, music, videos and files from your computer (where the server is running) to your Nintendo Wii. It runs on most major operating systems including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Here’s a video of how it works.

Today a free trial version of the Opera browser is available for download on Nintendo’s Wii. The unique Wii Remote has made it possible to surf the Web in a new way with the Opera browser on your TV. Simply point and click to go to a Web page, select a link or input text. Click and move the Wii Remote up, down, left or right to navigate a page.

The pages should not differ from what you see on your computer and this is just another reason not to remove yourself from the Wii. The navigation looks very intuitive and quite fun with the Wii remote.

If you’re really curious or you don’t own a Wii just yet, you can watch a video of the browser in action.

Features overview

• Intelligent Zoom: Opera unleashes its new Intelligent Zoom technology for the first time on the Wii. Point the Wii Remote at an object on the page and zoom in on that object with the + button. Once zoomed in, the Wii Remote allows you to pan around the page while remaining in zoom mode.
• Scrolling with the Wii Remote: By pointing the Wii Remote at the TV and pressing the B button, Wii users can simply move the Wii Remote up or down to scroll a page.
• Favorites: Pick your favorite page and select the star button from the user interface to add it as a favorite. Once in your favorites, edit, rename or delete your current selections.
• Single column mode: To view the Web page in new way, select single column mode to get your content stacked. This mode is similar to Opera’s Small Screen Rendering technology for mobile phones and other small screen devices, and is useful when viewing content from a distance.
• On-screen keyboard: Input text with the on-screen keyboard by pointing your Wii Remote to select the letter. Wii has a predictive text feature to auto-complete words and URLs.
• View AJAX-based applications: Sites such as maps.google.com work on Wii, as Opera offers full support for AJAX-based applications in its browser for Wii.
• Flash-enabled: View Flash content on the Web, including popular sites with video content.

Nintendo is currently offering a free trial of Opera for Wii which is now available for download. The release of the final version of the Opera browser for Wii is currently scheduled for late March 2007. Opera for Wii will remain a free download until June 30, 2007. After June 30, Opera will be available for download from the Wii Shop Channel for 500 Wii points ($5). Users who download Opera before June 30, 2007, can continue to use the browser at no cost for the lifetime of the Wii system.