On July 28, 2017, Youtube stopped supporting their Wii Youtube channel. In response, there was a request to make WiiMC able to download and play Youtube videos. The file youtube.py, properly set up with a web server, and onlinemedia.xml, set up with WiiMC, allows WiiMC to view Youtube videos.
- A modded Wii, enabled to run Homebrew applications.
- WiiMC
- A web server that can run Python2 cgi scripts.
- youtube-dl on your web server
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Copy youtube.py to your web server's cgi directory.
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Edit the media_dir line of youtube.py. Point media_dir to whatever directory you want your cache of youtube files to be in.
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Install the youtube-dl binary (https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/download.html) into your path (such as /usr/local/bin/)
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Edit WiiMC's onlinemedia.xml file. This is a settings file, probably on your SD card, probably in the apps/wiimc/ directory. The Youtube lines, by default, look like this:
Edit them to look more like this:
<link name="YouTube" type="search" addr="http://yourdomainorip/yourpathtoyoutubepy/youtube.py?watch=" />
<link name="YouTube - Search" type="search" addr="http://yourdomainorip/yourpathtoyoutubepy/youtube.py?query=" />
Note that they are now both type="search" and they both point to youtube.py.
All video files must go through your web server. This is a requirement because WiiMC only supports http connections, and Youtube only supports https connections. This project enables a web server to act as a bridge between WiiMC and Youtube. If your web server is remote, your web server will be using bandwidth to pull the video from Youtube, and also to push the video to your Wii.