While nowadays game consoles try to be a complete entertainment platform it doesn’t mean all of them were perfect at it. For most consoles, DVD and Blu-Ray compatibility are a given, but if you are wondering if can Wii U play Blu Ray we have to tell you that it can’t.
This glaring omission from Nintendo resulted in the Wii U being seriously handicapped compared to its competitors. Today we’ll take a look at what keeps the Wii U from playing Blu Ray and DVD and take a look at how you can get past this.
Why Exactly Can’t the Wii U Deluxe/Basic Play Blu Ray?
The Wii U system does not support Blu-ray discs, DVD discs, CDs, GameCube discs, etc.
Unlike the Switch which simply does not have any form of CD drive, the Wii U does load games from discs. And yet despite this fact, it’s completely unable to load anything saved on a DVD or Blu-ray. So why does this exactly happen?
The reason turns out is cost-cutting. As explained by Nintendo it was their belief that most households already had enough devices able to read discs. As such they chose to not pay for the patents related to Blu Ray, meaning that they willingly made the choice to completely take away the console’s ability to read these discs.
As a result, the disc drive in the Wii U is physically incompatible with Blu Ray discs, and in fact, Wii U discs can be considered a completely different category.
What Happens When you Play a Blu-ray in a Nintendo Wii U?
When you insert a Blu-ray disc into the game console, it will tell you that this is an “Invalid Disc”.
When you press button A from the Wii U Pro controller, a window will pop up, said:” The disc could not be read. Press the EJECT button, remove the disc and check that the label side is facing the proper direction and displays either the Wii U or Wii Logo.”
How to Play Blu-rays on a Wii U Console?
While there’s no way to make a Wii U boot a Blu Ray, there’s still a silver lining amongst all of this.
The web browser of the Wii U can be used as a media player, which supports MP4, M3U8+TS (HTTP Live Streaming).
Also, the Wii U does count with a USB port and it can play video from it.
So, to play Blu-ray on Wii u, all we need to do is to convert the blu-ray disc to an Mp4 video file. This will be the way we make your blu-ray films work on the Wii U.
Convert Your Blu-ray Collection to Mp4 and Play in Wii U
While there’s no way to make a Wii U play Blu Rays the console itself can in fact play media, and this is what we’ll take advantage of.
In short, we need to make sure to convert those Blu Rays to a format the Wii U can play. This functionally means MP4 and M3U8+TS (HTTP Live Streaming). but we’ll focus on MP4 this time.
If the idea of converting Blu Rays sounds daunting you don’t need to worry, it’s way easier than it sounds and also rather fast.
As the Wii U has no way to convert Blu Rays on its own we need to install a converter on a PC, and this time we are going with Tipard Blu-ray Converter.
Tipard has various features that make it the ideal pick, amongst these are speed and its availability as a free download. However, the fact that Tipard already comes with a Wii preset is really the biggest perk for anybody new to converting.
To convert Blu-rays for Wii U:
Click the button below and download your copy of Tipard Blu-ray Converter.
Then follow the installation process and once you are ready, grab the Blu Ray you wish to convert. Insert the disc into the Blu-ray drive attached to your PC and open Tipard. The menu is really intuitive and the first screen also has instructions so it’ll be a snap.
The first thing you need to do is to click on the load CD icon. It’s the CD with a plus sign. Choose your Blu Ray to load and wait for it to register on the program.
Once the Blu Ray is loaded go to the “Rip All to” on the right-side options and click it. The Profile option lets you control which format you want to convert to, but it has the advantage of being organized by device. So make sure to look for the Wii and DS profiles and pick MP4 from them.
Once that is done you have pretty much finished. Below Profile, you can choose output Location, which allows you to select where your file will appear on the PC.
Now click on convert on the bottom right corner and wait for a bit. Your movie is now converting to MP4 and Tipard will let you know once it’s done. All you have to do now is to save the new file to a USB and plug it into your Wii U. You’ll be able to play your Blu Ray film despite the lack of compatibility in the console.