Yesterday and today I went and got my Wii controller linked up to my htpc in the living room. No more boring old standard infrared remote control for me, now I can control the pc with my Wii controller. The first solution I found was MythPyWii which worked pretty well, but was nonetheless useless (due to some restrictions in the way myth works, and the way MythPyWii sends it’s data to myth) because Wii input was not forwarded to myth plugins (e.g. Myth Video or Myth Games).  Next I had a look at the inner working of MythPyWii and had a better look at wminput from the cwiid project.  Anyone who want’s to do this stuff: the packages bundeled with varios distributions kinda suck. Go ahead and pull the lastest codebase from their SVN and compile it yourself. If you want to go into serious FPS you are going to have to do it anyway to get some additional plugins compiled. I then set up the controls to work fine with mythtv and my video players (mplayer, vlc). With that done, I could (more or less) replace me traditional remote with a wii remote, now it was time for the fun stuff.

Next on my list was google earth (since controlling google earth with a Wii Remote just has to count as cool), easy to download and install. somewhat more challenging getting it into mythtv (Myth Games), don’t worry too much, plenty of helpful site around the internet, various ways to do it. The key mapping Wii->Keyboard was somewhat more difficult, since wminput currently doesn’t support different profiles, and I wasn’t in the mood of actually coding that functionality in. So I did a dirty hack: the script that calls google earth, switches the wminput config and then restarts wminput. The downside to this is that the controller has to reconnect. oh well.

I did the same with ScummVM, and now can play “point and click” adventures with my Wii Remote on the TV in the living room. Now that definatly counts as cool. As with google earth, the scummvm got it’s own key bindings.

I’d recommend using the acc_led plugin for wminput. I use it to signal which profile the controller it is currently in (or if it is in a profile at all). Without this plugin, you can’t tell if the controller is linked to the pc or not (you can’t even see if it is on or off).