Tivo and Netgear for DLNA/UPNP

[scottb]

Hello everyone,
I made something work, and it was difficult enough that I thought I would share it with others.

I have a Netgear WNDR3700v1 wireless router with a USB port. I connected up an external HDD to it, with the plans of sharing music, movies, and photos to my S3 HD Tivo. I worked on this problem for a past month or two, and just recently got it working. This functionality is completely independent of Tivo Desktop, or Tivo Desktop Plus, and doesn't require Tivo Desktop or Tivo Desktop Plus to be installed or running.

With the upgrade of my Netgear WNDR3700v1 wireless router to Firmware 1.0.16.98, I now have all of my music, movies, and photos content available via my S3 HD Tivo menu.

If you need to troubleshoot, at the root of your attached USB external HDD, change your Windows folder options to display hidden files. It is then you will see a .ReadyDLNA folder, and under that will be additional files and folders. If you are having trouble displaying the content on your Tivo from the attached USB external HDD, check the "minidlna.log" file for content indexing information and errors. This helped me determine if some of the music, movies, and photo files on the external HDD were corrupted or otherwise not able to be scanned and cataloged.

Remember that when you add additional content to the USB external HDD to make available to the Tivo, you may have to go into the device management screens of your Netgear router and toggle the enable/disable Media Server feature of ReadyDLNA, or just toggle the rescan of media option.

Hope this helps. Post here if you have questions.
Scott

[Azlen]

I'm a bit unclear as to how your Tivo is seeing the files on the drive attached to your router. To the best of my knowledge, Tivo doesn't see DLNA servers, so how are you doing it?

[CuriousMark]

Originally Posted by Azlen

I'm a bit unclear as to how your Tivo is seeing the files on the drive attached to your router. To the best of my knowledge, Tivo doesn't see DLNA servers, so how are you doing it?

Netgear's ReadyDLNA is both a DLNA and TiVo HMO server. That is why both TiVo and Standard DLNA clients can see the contents.

[nrc]

This was originally only available on their ReadyNAS units. Cool to see that they've added it to some of their routers.

[scottb]

Yep, it works great. If anyone needs more information, let me know.

Here are the links to Tivo's website about the partnership, but when I called Tivo Support for help, they didn't have any idea about it, and haven't ever heard of a Netgear Media Server (ReadyDLNA) on a wireless router serving content to a Tivo.

Here is the link: http://www.tivo.com/abouttivo/affili...m/netgear.html

Scott

[malkalm]

Originally Posted by scottb

Yep, it works great. If anyone needs more information, let me know.

Hey Scott,

I just bought a WNDR4300 and I can get the Tivo Server activated but i cannot figure out how to transfer recordings to my Harddrive from my tivo. Can you let me know the steps you took to set it up with your tivo?

[malkalm]

to follow up so far all I have figured out is to tx the recordings to my computer using tivo desktop then tx them to my network harddrive. I'm sure there is a better way.

[Saxion]

Scott, what format are your video files in, such that they are playable on the S3?

[P42]

@malkalm have a look at kmttg in the TiVo Home Media Features & TiVoToGo. It is a little difficult to set up, but once done, you can have it automatically pull certain content off your Tivo, strip ads, re-encode to mpeg4 to save space, and then push it to your network harddrive.