Tech by PC

This is some good stuff. I downloaded the DirecTV2PC beta recently and have been using it to watch recorded shows in other rooms of the house. Read on for a full review with screen shots.

DirecTV2PC Requirements

There is a requirement wizard that will test your PC to see if you meet the minimum requirements. I downloaded but did not run this tool. The PC I ran this on is a Core2 Duo at 2.33GHz with 2GB of RAM and an Nvidia embedded graphics solution. Nothing too fancy there.

DirecTV2PC Installation

The installation is standard. You have to register an email address with DirecTV so that you get a key to put into the program.

DirecTV2PC Operation

The first screen that appears is as follows:

This screen takes a while to search for and find my HD20 receiver, but when it does it will appear in the list. The “Scan Again” button does not need to be pressed for me - it does not speed up the process of searching. I have waited as much as 20 minutes for my receiver to be found. The firewall I run (NOD32) blocked UPNP which DirecTV2PC uses to discover the receiver, however it did not speed things up to allow UPNP through the firewall for this program. Some suggestions for DirecTV are to cache the previously connected session so it doesn’t have to do discovery every time.

When it finally does appear, click Connect. I assume that if you have more than one receiver you will have them all in the list eventually. The number is a serial number that can be found on your receiver. This should probably be changed to use the easy name from DirecTV’s site like Living Room.

Once connected, the screen looks similar to the screen you are used to seeing. The mouse can be used to select items as can the keyboard. This should support people with remote controls for their PCs quite easily. Can you tell I have kids?

Playing the movie also provides controls you are used to such as fast forward, rewind and pause. The video does not buffer much, so a slight network problem may cause choppy performance. I can use this successfully over my 802.11n wireless network. My firewall program says the network traffic is around 1 - 2MB/s during playback of an HD movie. CPU Usage is between 60-70%, which heats my laptop up pretty well. The video only has two modes, windowed and full screen. I am unable to change the size in windowed mode.

This is my blocked title from above, Saving Private Ryan. I block because I have young children. According to the DirecTV site, parental controls do not work properly, however it seems to work fine for me, and asks for my pin before proceeding.

Probably the best feature is the ability to click along the progress bar and immediately jump to any place in the recorded program. This works quite well and picks up without have to rebuffer. The other great thing is that now we can watch two different shows at the same time. Great for days when I am home sick or my wife wants to watch Dr. Phil or Ghost Hunters.

This is what I was wishing for a long time ago. It does not work across a WAN by default, however I’m sure with some port forwarding magic and sufficient bandwidth you could make it work.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 13th, 2008 at 3:35 pm and is filed under Fun, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.