Jeff’s Place

To get your music, videos, photos etc. stored on a Windows Vista machine to show up on your DirecTV HD-DVR you just have to get your windows machine set up to correctly share your files. The DVR, once on the net, will find the windows machine and try to get the content.

I did this with a DirecTV HD-DVR HR20-700, and an HP 2510p laptop running Windows Vista Ultimate. It should work more or less the same with any HR20 or HR21 DVR, and any Vista machine with the media components (I think that means home premium or ultimate, vista business probably doesn’t have the media stuff, not sure about the other home versions). The DVR needs to be running one of the latest releases that includes the MediaShare Beta software (otherwise you won’t have the menu item that gets into the shared media area).

(This is still a work in progress, check back for more detail later)

1. Get your DVR on your network. It only has a wired connection, but if you don’t have a wired network there are relatively cheap wireless-to-wired bridges that might work for you. Once you do this, your Vista machine may pop up a notice that your DVR connected to it, if it asks you to allow or deny, choose to allow. Unfortunately this thing only pops up once, I didn’t make a note of exactly what it said and I don’t have a virgin Vista machine handy to try to make it happen again so I can describe it here.
2. Open Windows Media Player (I have version 11 installed, I don’t know if this stuff works on earlier versions). Click at the bottom of the “Library” tab and a menu will pop up, pick “Media Sharing…”. In the window that pops up you may (hopefully) see that it’s already noticed your DirecTV DVR. Check the box next to “Share my media to”, click the DVR’s icon, and click “Allow” to give it access to your media library. You might want to fiddle with the “Settings” if you want to limit what gets shared.
   

   Windows Media Sharing dailog

3. Also in the “Library” menu click “Add to Library…” and make sure any locations which contain your music/video/etc files are listed. Vista seems to populate some things in this list automagically, I suppose as part of it’s indexing. This is probably one of the things that eats up disk IO bandwidth and makes the machine slower than it should be, but in this case it’s probably useful. I added my E:\Music folder manually and it quickly indexed it. It appears, although I have not confirmed, that these “Monitored Folders” are also tied to the folders you tell Windows Media Center to monitor, maybe it’s the same setting displayed a different way. That would make sense but who knows…
   

   Windows Media Player Add-to-Library dialog

4. If you want to share photos, it appears that you have to set up the photo library using Windows Photo Gallery. If you’ve never used it then you’ll just have the dozen or so stock photos that get installed with Vista. If you have photos in your personal “Photos” folder, they will appear here and be shared. If you want to add more folders, go to the “File” menu and pick “Add folder to gallery” and pick your photo folders to add them.

Finally…

On the DirecTV DVR remote, hit the “Menu” button and pick “Music, Photos & More”. You should see “My Computers”, hit Select, it should expand and show the name of your computer(s), pick the computer you want and Select. Pick “Music”, then scroll down to “Folders” and on the left you should see your folders hierarchy, hunt through them and you should see what your shares on the Vista machine allow. It appears that you can share playlists and such as well, I haven’t tried that yet.

You can view the photos in your photo album in the “Pictures” list. If you pick a photo, it starts a slideshow with that photo, and keeps looping apparently forever. It gives you the option of playing music along with it, or you can keep your music playing from the step above.

When you have both music and a slideshow running, use the green button on the remote to toggle the forward/back controls between the photo and music. Use the forward/back buttons to go to the previous/next photo or song.

I tried adding my DVD’s folder to the folder lists in both Windows Photo Gallery and Windows Media Player, hoping to get the DVR to play my DVDs but couldn’t get that to work. I’ll keep trying and update here if I can figure it out. it looks like the Windows media stuff won’t populate the DVD folders into the Video library, probably because they’re full of VOB files that it doesn’t recognize or something. I tried adding Windows Media Player as the default app for .VOB but that didn’t help. It would probably work if you can convert the DVD VOB mpeg streams into a WMV file or something, but I’m not sure what would get lost in the process, probably the DVD menus and such would get clobbered. There is some info in the forums on dbstalk.com about using a transcoding software to make it work, apparently the DirecTV box currently only plays mpeg2 with non-dolby audio. If playing DVDs from an online library via the DirecTV DVR could work, it’ll be the holy grail of windows/TV integration!

It appears that you can set up playlists, both for music and photos, and have the DVR play a slideshow along with your music. This could be an interesting party trick, more later if I have a chance to play with it one of these days.

Unfortunately, while sitting here writing this stuff up, I had a slideshow running and music playing and the DVR locked up hard, had to hit the red reset button and wait the requisite 20 minutes for the damn thing to boot. Even when it’s working right sometimes the UI gets really really really slow. The DirecTV DVR, both hardware and UI, is really a huge step back from the previous generation HR10 Tivo-based units, but that’s a whole other story.