for keeping track of my digital experiments

I have been trying unsuccessfully for the past couple of months (on and off) to stream content from my home Linux servers to several DirecTV HR20-700’s. This latest attempt, actually worked and I wanted to document my exact setup as no other literature has done.

Stuff you need:

1. Debian 5 installed on a computer with ~ 1GHZ CPU, 256MB RAM, hard drive with media content on it
2. reliable Internet connection
3. a DirecTV HR2x

 
 
Here are the exact commands you need to run, I’ll explain them later.

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get -y install screen vlc vorbis-tools mpg123 ffmpeg unzip subversion build-essential autoconf automake curl libexpat-ocaml-dev libsqlite3-dev libcurl-ocaml-dev libid3-3.8.3-dev libtagc0-dev libavformat-dev libexif-dev
svn co https://svn.mediatomb.cc/svnroot/mediatomb/trunk/mediatomb mediatomb
cd mediatomb
autoreconf -i
./configure
make
make install
cd
wget http://vraidsys.com/article-includes/mediatomb.zip
mv mediatomb.zip /etc/
cd /etc/
unzip mediatomb.zip
rm mediatomb.zip
mkdir /var/lib/mediatomb
chmod -R 777 /var/lib/mediatomb/
cd
mv /etc/mediatomb/mediatomb /etc/init.d/
vi /etc/init.d/mediatomb < -- change line so ethX reads eth0, eth1, or whatever your LAN network interface card is assigned to
chmod +x /etc/init.d/mediatomb
update-rc.d mediatomb defaults

The idea is that the default MediaTomb install found in the repos (version 11) doesn’t support transcoding quite right for the DirecTV HR2x. So we do an install from the repos for a bunch of dependencies for the latest code (version 12) that we then checkout from the project SVN repo. A new configuration script that I built is downloaded and installed. It has support for transcoding ogg, mp3, flac, flv, avi, mkv, mov, and a few other formats (pretty easy to add support for other formats check out –> http://mediatomb.cc/dokuwiki/transcoding:transcoding#directv_hr2x_transcoding).

MediaTomb will be automatically started on boot. It can also be stopped and started manually by: /etc/init.d/mediatomb stop or /etc/init.d/mediatomb start.

You can then go to the webui of MediaTomb and update your media library. –> http://hostname:49152/

For those of you who don’t know about DirecTV2PC … check it out! It’s pretty awesome (if you have a Windows PC and a DirecTV DVR).

Here is what I did to get DirecTV2PC working in my Local Area Network with two HR20 set top boxes.

1. Go to http://www.directv.com/directv2pc and click the Download Beta button on the right side of the page
2. When the pop-up comes up, click Continue to Beta download
3. Click Download Now to download the DirecTV PC Playback Advisor application to see if you pc is up to running the DirecTV2PC application.  Once you finish the download run the installation and then run the application. The application sometimes falsely identifies your system specs. As long as your PC is running Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or Windows Vista with Service Pack 1, a 2Ghz processor, and 512MB ram you should be good to go.
4. If you PC passes the application or you believe it should be able to handle the application according to the rules of thumb  I laid out in the previous step, then enter your name and email on the page and click the Submit button. The DirecTV2PC application download will then start. It is a 32 MB file, but it may take awhile to download. The average speed I rolled for the download was 20kb/sec. It took about 30 minutes to download … atrocious! Once your download completes, you will be sent an activation code to the email you provided earlier. Edit (1/22/2009): You only have to start the download, then you will be emailed an activation code. I put the application up on my data server, and you can download the DirecTV2PC app here. You will get a better download speed than 20kb/sec!
5. Run the installer and fill out the various fields.
6. Now run the application, for the application to properly activate you will need to:
   • be connected to the Internet
   • open TCP port 443 (incoming and outgoing) on your router’s firewall
   • open your PC’s firewall for the DirecTV2PC application (you should be automatically prompted by Windows)
7. If the application still does not activate properly, that means that your ISP’s DNS servers have not updated Cyberlink’s new IPv4 address for the A record activation.cyberlink.com. (Or Cyberlink is jerking around with their IPv4 addresses again … bah!)
   Here is what you do:
   add exactly what is in quotes: “203.73.94.101 activation.cyberlink.com”
   to the file “c:/windows/system32/drivers/etc/hosts” (if your main hard disk drive is lettered “c”)
8. Enjoy your DVR’s movies!