I mentioned in my previous post how I stumbled over DirecTV2PC while trying to get some of the media sharing functionality of the DirecTV receiver to work. Well, I have taken a bit of time to download and try it out and I have to say it works remarkably well.

In a nutshell, DirecTV2PC does the following: it connects to your Dish DVR (that is connected to your network) and allows you to view any of your recorded shows on your computer. Essentially, it gives you a remote version of your list of recordings that looks and behaves just like the DVR version. From there, you just pick the show you want to watch, relax in your lawn chair, bath tub or bed and enjoy the show.

The obvious question is this: does it work well?

The short answer is yes. It works very well.

To give you an idea of what’s needed for it to work well, here’s a quick description of my network. I’d say it’s fairly typical. My DVR is connected by cable to my router. The computer this was tested on, a Dell XPS laptop, connects using wifi to the router and streams it this way. Very simple yet very functional.

I have tested both SD content and HD content and both work without noticable problems. I don’t have a HD display on my laptop so I can’t really say how well it would work on a real HD screen but with what I have, full screen playback works great with both SD and HD content.

As far as I am concerned, DirecTV2PC is a great little piece of software and I expect that I’ll get quite a bit of use out of it.

Now, if I can just get the media sharing part with my computer to work, I’ll be all set…

Oh, and no, DirecTV2PC does not work on Linux, at least not using Wine…from what I can tell, at least.