Disturbing news from a fairly repuatable source (Engadet) about the soon-to-be-released Photo Channel update.

If you update your Photo Channel you will lose MP3 support for background music during slideshows, and instead have it replaced with AAC format support. Sure, AAC sounds better, but most of my (and many other peoples) CD collection has been ripped to MP3 years ago … I don’t exactly want to have to go back and re-rip all that music again. Maybe this is because Nintendo doesn’t want to pay the 75 cents per device licensing fee for using MP3 … if so that is pretty tight. If they remove MP3 support, they may as well replace it with the royalty free OGG format, since if the Photo Channel won’t support MP3 most people are going to have to convert their music to some new format to use it on the Wii anyway ….

I certainly won’t be updating my Photo Channel if MP3 support is removed, unless there is some compelling must-have new feature that I feel really outweighs what is otherwise a serious backward step.

 For the record, here is my comment on Digg on the topic:

This is the one major thing I HATE about the Wii (and new consoles generally) … I don’t have full control over the software running on the hardware that I own. It’s a great example of how the customer get’s screwed by technologies like DRM and “Trusted Computing” (or whatever it’s called these days to escape the bad PR).

I love my Wii, but I simultaneously feel like a retard for buying one and continually getting screwed by Nintendo with things like this impending update. I really don’t like supporting companies who do this kind of thing, and I’ll think very hard before buying the next Nintendo console (I bought a Wii on the basis that it was supposed to be ‘region free’ for first-party games, a decision I still don’t regret, but it annoys me that this ’feature’ turned out to be a widely reported lie by a Nintendo employee prior to the release date).

The sooner this console is hacked wide open for homebrew software the better.