Hacking Homebrew Homebrew app Is there a way to use homebrew to bring any Non-YouTube video apps (Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, Hulu) back to the Wii U?

[jason_maxym]

I have all the video apps they released for Wii U (afaik) and except for youtube, none of the other ones seem to have things that can bring them back to full functionality. Is there a way to do this or because of what would be licensing issues is it impossible?

 

[Nukatha]

"Is it possible to make a turing-complete machine do X'? Well, yes.
"Is it practical?"
How good is your knowledge of PowerPC 750 machine code?

 

[MikaDubbz]

Possible? Technically, sure. Realistic? Hell no.

 

[Ettino]

I have all the video apps they released for Wii U (afaik) and except for youtube, none of the other ones seem to have things that can bring them back to full functionality. Is there a way to do this or because of what would be licensing issues is it impossible?

They're no longer support. If you just want to watch stuff for free. Just use your phone, there are plenty of apps to do that already.

 

[raging_chaos]

Is there a way to do this or because of what would be licensing issues is it impossible?

The Wii U uses H.264 (AVC) for video, streaming services have been progressively moving to the AV1 codec and they eventually drop support for older codecs in favor of more efficient ones that take up less storage space and bandwidth. The only way those apps would work is if Nintendo updated the Wii U to also support newer codecs through software but that's not going to happen.

 

[V10lator]

Forget the other replies except the one mentioning PPC 750 assembly.

The thing is not about codecs, it's not about how powerfull the Wii U is, it's all about DRM. All the big players you mentioned are using widevine DRM by google. This widevine module the Wii U had back in the days is no longer supported from googles end (cause, you know, DRM, so the slightest bug means it looses support). To revive this we need a PowerPC compatible widevine module from google.

I thought no such module exists for a long time but have been proven wrong. There are indeed other PPC based consoles which have working Netflix & Co support today. So what one would need to do is to take such a module from another console, then write wrappers for that other consoles APIs to the Wii Us APIs. That alone is all other than simple but it's not all: The PPC used in the Wii U is a (modified) PPC 750, so code for more modern PowerPCs won't run. That's what we call ABI compatibility and so far I'm just assuming/hoping these other consoles are ABI compatible, else you can forget this project completely cause emulating CPU functions for such a beast like widevine DRM would be too slow.

AV1 codec

Even if the Wii U wouldn't have a hardware decoder for that the Wii Us CPU is powerfull enough to decode this in 1080p in software. All of this assumes the big players wouldn't still stream h264 for legacy devices but they do this, so this really, really isn't about codecs.

 

[MikaDubbz]

Hell, every response here has merit, just not every one explains why to OP it's not going to happen. But again, each respone is correct, from the technical reasons to why it will never happen, to those telling you to just watch the content elsewhere, to the posts saying it's never going to happen, even if technically it could happen if you had all the tools and resources at your disposal (but you would never get all those tools and resources that you'd need, so again, it's never going to happen).