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A Pleasant Surprise

  • Artigo

I recently got one of the DirecTV HR-20 "HD DVR" set top boxes at home. It has an Ethernet port on it, but I didn't bother to plug it into my home network until a few days ago.

Tonight I was watching TV and I noticed a new menu item in the set top box UI I had not seen before:  "Music & Photos"

I clicked and a screen popped up saying that Intel & DirecTV had collaborated on this and it could connect to a PC etc... etc... And it was a "beta".

The menu listed:

My Computers

  SERVER: 1

Hmmm... that's my Windows Home Server!  This DirecTV set top box is a Windows Media Connect media client!

Sure enough, clicking on "SERVER: 1" took me to a menu system that let me listen to and play all my music and view all my photos just as I can on my XBox360 and my Roku SoundBridge (but in even more places in my house). 

It just worked.

-cek

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Is there any trick in getting this to work?  I'm running Windows Home server, copied some music and photos in and also enabled Media Sharing.  I set my HR20 with a static IP, verified internet connectivity, but no extra menu is appearing.  

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    I saw that ethernet port and was too chicken to plug in. Directtv doing something right..  Very happy to hear it just works... I have 2 HR-20's and so happens I have already run the Cat 6 to their locations... Thanks for the info! I am a big fan of the blog and the new Home Server!!!

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Any chance you could get with the Windows Media Connect people and get a list of whoise set-top boxes do this? I have Verizon FiOS, and the set-top boxes are already TCP/IP clients on the LAN, but I put an internal firewall between them and the rest of my network. Don't trust them, but I might reconsider if there were some reason.

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    I posted a comment yesterday but it never showed up... It is nice WHS works with media players, but I have had no luck at all with Windows Media Player 11 on Windows Vista...

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    DirecTV is rolling out an update this week to support Video On Demand for the HR20-700.