DIRECTV2PC: Love the idea; Can’t get it to work

Now you can watch your favorite shows on your PC. With your DIRECTV Plus® HD DVR receiver and PC connected to your home network, the DIRECTV2PC™ application allows you to stream the programs you recorded on your DVR to your PC, where you can watch them on your HD monitor.

Sounds like a pretty cool idea.  I installed it on my Windows 7 PC tonight.  The interface looks as if you were sitting in front of your TV.

The bad news was that after about five seconds the video stopped playing a dialog on the screen indicated that it “couldn’t apply hardware protection mechanism”.  In doing further research it appears that this has something to do with the video and support for specific features around protected content within the driver.  I am using an ATI Radeon X1650 Pro which is a dual port DVI out card that has 512MB RAM.  I thought this card would sufficient.  The built-in Windows 7 driver for it is up to date, and ATI doesn’t have any Windows 7 drivers for this model.  When you select Windows 7, it takes you to the Vista x64 drivers and says that “these should work” but are unsupported in Windows 7.  That’s kind of a bummer.

This weekend I will probably have to see what else I have laying around for video cards and give those a try.  I have heard that this actually works on a Mac when run from inside BootCamp, however, the DirecTV app is not supported on a Mac, only a PC.

If you want to give the DIRECTV2PC beta a try for yourself, click here.