I switched from cable to Direct TV last week. I went with their whole home system. The system comes with one HD DVR and two additional HD receivers. The DVR does the bulk of the work. It does all the recording and stores recordings on its hard drive. The two receivers talk to the DVR through the cabling between each machine. You can watch whatever happens to be on the DVR’s hard drive from the three different locations, set up recordings, delete recordings, download movies and shows, etc. All this sounded way too cool to not give it a whirl. I’m not terribly impressed so far. So far I have had one receiver lock up hard, which affected the DVR, locking it up too. Twenty minutes later, after unplugging both machines and letting them do their thing to re-boot and talk to the satellite, they started working again. I think I'm going to have a love / hate relationship with this system.
My question is in regards to the networking capabilities. I need to plug the DVR into my broadband home network in order to use their video on demand feature. Supposedly, I can download movies and shows, some for a fee, others not. I plugged the DVR into my wired home network and tried to get it to connect. It connects to the home network, but will not connect to the internet. I have no trouble connecting any of my other devices to the internet using the same cable / network jack, so I’m not real sure what to troubleshoot to fix this problem. Suggestions?? I figured I’d ask the IT / Networking guys here before I waste an hour of my day on the phone with someone that I can’t understand in India reading a script.
