Turn an Old Nintendo Wii Into a Sonos-Style Streamer

Sonos is an audio equipment manufacturer that focuses on music streaming and wireless syncing of multiple speaker systems. But their products are a bit pricey and that cost isn’t very appealing if you just want to play local media or use a streaming service. If, however, you have an old Nintendo Wii collecting dust, Brad McGowan has a tutorial that will help you turn it into a Sonos-style music streamer.

Every console manufacturer attempts to lock down their systems to prevent piracy, cheating, and general misuse. But modders are crafty and always seem to find ways to circumvent manufacturer security. They cracked the original Nintendo Wii long ago, which allowed for homebrew (and pirated) game play. But not to worry if you like to follow the rules; nothing in McGowan’s tutorial requires piracy or anything illegal.

For this project to work, you’ll need a Nintendo Wii with a model number compatible with Boot2. You should look yours up to be sure, but most North American Wii models in white (the original release) will work. You can then follow McGowan’s instructions to perform the homebrew mod to get BootMii working. That will let you boot from an SD card, which lets you install Linux on the Wii.

You should now have a Wii running Linux, which is pretty cool all on its own. From there, you can configure the Linux OS for remote access through SSH and that will let you connect from a computer (or smartphone) on the same network.

The final step is to install and set up Mopidy, which is a very versatile open-source music server written in Python. Mopidy will let you do all kinds of fun stuff, including replicating many of the features offered by Sonos. You can play local music, stream music from services like Spotify, play internet radio, and more. Once setup, you can control your music using a client app for your smartphone, client program on your computer, or a web interface accessed over the local network.

We would normally suggest that you keep your Wii for playing games, but this is an interesting use for a Wii that would otherwise go unused.