Directv media sharing

Okay, this took me a long time to get working and I wanted to set out my steps. The most important part is noted below and it is the step that nearly everyone misses and if you don’t do it, nothing will work.

  1. Ensure that you network layout is correct by plugging in a computer to the cat5 cable you will put into the Directv DVR
  2. Attach network cable to Directv DVR
  3. Reboot Directv DVR (red button next to card)
  4. Enable and test network using Setup->Network->Connect Now and also Setup->Network->Test
  5. Turn on the media server PC and install Windows Media Player 11
  6. Open My Computer and share your My Music folder by clicking “Share this Folder” on the left side
  7. Turn off Windows firewall
  8. IMPORTANT! Open My Network Places and click “Show icons for networked UPnP devices” on the left hand side
  9. Reboot Directv DVR again
  10. Open Windows Media Player 11 and click the menu under Library called Media Sharing
  11. Check the share checkbox and the new devices checkbox
  12. You should also see “Unknown Device” in the list and click on that
  13. Hit okay and you should now see the Music and Videos option on the Directv DVR menu

19 thoughts on “Directv media sharing”

  3. Great info!! I’m surprised that you have to disable Windows Firewall, as it seems that step 8 would take care of opening the appropriate ports. I’m going to give your method a whirl and it sounds very promising.

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  4. windows firewall is pretty much useless if you have a firewall function on your router. basically, it just makes it harder for you to do stuff.

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  5. i have vista and windows media player shows direc tv dvr and i clicked share all but no i cons in dtv menue rebooted dvr 3 times with red button

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  6. I tried the steps with vista, some of the steps are different probably because this was XP. I could see my files names but could not connect to the files. Could you email me with steps to correct this?

    thanks

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  7. Works great with Vista B. x64., even with my crappy pent 2c and even got the video to work but only plays mpgs with a certan codex videos. Wont play regular mpg or avi files. that suck but only found out by accient. I hack my old DVR so I had downloaed video from my it to my computer. My new HD DVR plays these mpg files. Yea it also works great for showing pictues and you can even chose what song to play for the slideshow. Now if anyone know what codex to use let me know. trying to figure that out now.

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  9. I had this working with my old router, but I upgraded to a Wireless-N router, and I can’t get it to work. I feel like my router is blocking something …

    On my PC, I can see the DIRECTV MediaShare Renderer, but I never see the Music/Videos option on the DVR. Any thoughts?

    Darwin/fed: back when I had this working, I used TVersity. Windows Media player would only share certain file types, but TVersity would

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  10. Thanks! This worked just as you said. I can now see pictures and listen to all my MP3’s using my DVR. Very nice functionality.
    I have Windows XP Home edition.

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  11. Networking my pictures from my pc to my dvr and television.
    Both the PC and the DVR reconize each other. Pictures are shown on my PC monitor and just a few are
    received by my dvr and shown on the TV screen….Then no more pictures are on the TV and the message
    “ubable to access media”.
    Sometimes no pictures are shown but just yellow triangles with ? in the center where pictures might be andthe same message”unable to access media”
    Thanks for any help.
    Bailey
    Just a couple of months ago everything worked really fine?

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  12. After hooking up my directv to my network, my media player shows my directv player as a device and under videos, shows all my recorded shows. Unfortunately I am not able to play them. Error Msg: (Windows Media Player cannot play the file. The Player might not support the file type or might not support the codec that was used to compress the file.)

    Has anyone figured out how to access the files and play them on my PC?

    Thanks

    Windows 7
    Media Player 11
    Directv HR20

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  13. The Directv DVR only plays certain file formats:

    AVI – Raw videos or MPEG-2 with raw or MPEG-3 audio I think
    MP3 – Audio

    I think those are really the only formats that it will play currently. Others might know more.

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  18. Not really sure. It should play a couple of different audio files. At least MP3. I’ve pretty much abandoned the whole thing because it is so cheap to get a better system for all of it. Boxee box is looking pretty cool and Google TV/Apple TV are pretty nice as well.

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