DirecTV MediaShare Video Settings
If you are using DirecTV’s MediaShare to view videos from your PC on your DirecTV receiver, you may find the following information useful.
In order to use MediaShare, you must have your receiver connected to your home network with wired ethernet or a wireless ethernet adapter. You must also share some of your folders on your PC so that they are visible to MediaShare over your LAN. Please see DirecTV for more information and instructions, as they are too lengthy to post here.
After you sort out any networking issues, you should be able to see your PC when you press your DirecTV remote’s Menu button, and select the Photos and Videos option from the menu. You can then see your PC and drill into the options to play your MP3s, view photos or watch videos.
And now the reason for this post….watching videos in MediaShare. My thought was to rip a DVD to my hard drive on the PC, and just watch it in full quality from there instead of loading the physical DVD into the DVD player. Talk about stupid, I know, but I wanted to try it.
Videos to play back in MediaShare can only be in one format: MPEG2. That’s it. Nothing else. In addition, you have to remain below a certain threshold of video quality or else the video cannot be played. I DO NOT know what that threshold is, but here are some settings that I used that worked with some testing.
Audio: 192Kbps
Audio Sample: 48000
Audio Format: MP2 — This is KEY! Any other format will result in NO SOUND in the finished file’s playback!!
Video Quality – 1800 — is pretty good, not like the DVD source though. 1000 was rough. I didn’t try higher than 1800
Video Frame Rate – 29.97. I used this because it was a default in my converter
Video Format – MPEG2 – This is KEY!
I don’t have enough time to see what the upper quality limit is, and the error message in DirecTV only says that the quality level exceeds something, so I can’t offer much help on that error. But that error message is what prompted me to at least document what worked so far and hopefully I’ve helped more than just me out with this post.
If you can help out, please post!
I was wondering what program would you recommend to convert mp4 files into mediashare-compliant files?