DirecTV advertises its HR20 and HR21 HD DVR's can stream music, photo, and video files from an Intel ViiV PC.  But they can actually stream those files from any uPnP server, including plain ol' WMP11.

 

Getting WMP to share a folder from a different PC on the network requires some extra steps, detailed here:  http://www.dbstalk.com/showthread.php?t=114861 (specifically the "problem #1" section).

 

Those extra steps unfortunately assume the remote PC with the folders to be shared is also a Windows PC.  Anyone got suggestions how to do this with an UnRaid server?

 

If I could figure this out, it will be like instantly having HTPC's in two more rooms of the house.

 

Thanks!

 

 

Wow, that's a hugely detailed post about how to setup anonymous sharing on your network shares blah blah. Which we do not need to do on unRAID. What, exactly, is the issue? Seems like if you've got all of the settings in WMP setup correctly that it ought to work. You might have an issue using UNC pathing and have to create a drive letter but unless I missed something in that wall of text it looks to me like it ought to work. I've pretty much stopped playing with UNPN since I could never find a decent server for it so I've not messed with WMP11, I cannot verify it works or doesn't. Have you tried it? What seems to not work? FWIW, I use XBMC on XBOX and on Linux as front ends but I do see where having an already installed receiver working might be nice even if it is UPNP. <shrug>

What have you tried? Based upon the document you linked, I would expect the only thing needed is to perform this registry modification on the PC running WMP11:

This first procedure enables remote content sharing on the computer that contains your WMP11 library.

1) Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.

2) In the registry tree expand HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, SOFTWARE, Microsoft, MediaPlayer, Preferences, HME.

3) Right-click HME, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.

4) Type EnableRemoteContentSharing, and then press ENTER.

5) Right-click EnableRemoteContentSharing, and then click Modify.

6) In the Value data text box, type 1, and then click OK. Value of 0 is disable.

Unless you have user-level security set up on unRAID, I think it already allows anonymous access to shared files from Windows point of view. Basically the only limitation is that out of the box, WMP11 won't share shared content.

 

Anyway, personally I use TVersity as a UPnP server since at the moment I view everything through my XBOX360, either via UPNP or MCE depending on the type of content.