[shirizaki @ Oct 30th 2006 12:21PM]

There's 2 reasons why they won't put DVD support on:

1 - Having a near proprietary disc format (mini DVD's that are written/read backwards) allows for them to protect against piracy. Not supporting full DVD's (and a full DVD tray) allows them to stave off piracy. How hard is it to play pirated/import GC games? hard. Case mods, mod chips, and the ability to actually rip the games.

2 - Almost everyone has another console with DVD playback, a computer, or a standalone player for DVD's. There's 0 reason for Nintendo to provide DVD playback when another hardware company provides it.

[kumo @ Oct 30th 2006 1:09PM]

Playing imported games 'just' needs a special boot CD, however I have no idea about playing pirated stuff, but I would imagine that these mini DVDs do appear to stop people downloading ISOs from the internet.

[Sean @ Nov 2nd 2006 2:54PM]

Wii uses full size DVD discs, not the old GC mini DVDs. The GC copy protection was broken long ago, first by a network hack via Phantasy Star Online V1+2, and then later using an Action Replay disc as a boot disc through a memory card hack. It is not hard at all to use these hacks, albeit slightly more difficult than the solutions on their competing systems. The reason that it took longer to hack the GC though prolly had more to do with installed user base than ease of hacking it. Although we kind of have a chicken/egg conundrum here as piracy does sell systems. You would be lying to yourself if you thought that approximately 33% of those 100 million or so PS2s weren't bought exclusively for pirating software.

I applaud Nintendo's copy protection in the past, and hopefully Blu-Ray provides a similar deterrent for piracy on the PS3. Unlikely given the persistence of pirates nowadays, the PSP was practically hacked on release day making it the Dreamcast of the portable world; lots of systems sold but no game sales.

Now as for the topic at hand...this may be some viral FUD spread to deter Wii sales as we hit the holiday buying rush, but that's just my opinion. DVD-Video would be entirely useless on this system and a new version within a year or so would be destructive to system sales.