Watch Hulu and more on your DirecTV DVR with PlayOn

// January 5th, 2009 // fun

Wow, I didn’t even know this was possibly until my friend offhandedly mentioned it to me today, which really bugged me because he knows this stuff and fails to tell me most of the time until it’s already old news.

There is an application out there called PlayOn, which you can download here and read more about it.  The purpose of PlayOn is to provide a means for your various electronic devices to browse and display video content from all kinds of places, like Hulu.com, ESPN.com, CBS and more. Heck, even Netflix!

It works for your Playstation3, Xbox360, etc. And as I found out today, it also works for your DirecTV HD DVR.

It’s fairly easy to setup as long as your DVR is already on your home network. If you download On Demand content with your DVR, then it’s already on your network. If it’s not, then you probably should try to make that happens. Lots of cool stuff happens if you do *grin*

For those that don’t have ethernet wired to their entertainment centers, there are these new fangled “electric” devices that use your home’s internal electric network to pipe your information over. I’ve heard that some of these are very, very good and even boast a  very high speed.

Once you have that ready, here are the easy steps:

  1. Download and install PlayOn on a computer that you play on having up most of the time, or at least, one you need to have up and running whenever you want to watch this stuff on your TV
  2. Launch the program
  3. Go to your DVR, hit the Menu Button, then click on Music, Photos and More. You click on the next link, which is something like My Computers, and then you should see the name of the computer where you installed PlayOn.
  4. Browse through the categories and start watching videos!

That’s it. Worked for me on the first try. Now the entire Hulu library is available for me to watch on my TV with minimal effort, anytime I want. Pretty slick.

Let me know if you try it and how it works out for you.

8 Responses to “Watch Hulu and more on your DirecTV DVR with PlayOn”

  1. Tyler says:
    January 6, 2009 at 9:31 am

    Can I assume this is something you will purchase after the 14 day free trial?

  2. Mike says:
    January 6, 2009 at 9:33 am

    It depends…I should have written about that but forgot. $30 isn’t much to use their service if it expands to lots of other websites and stuff.

  3. David Karlton says:
    January 7, 2009 at 3:32 am

    Thanks for the write-up about PlayOn! We’ve actually seen the DirecTV devices in action with PlayOn, and they seem to work pretty well. If you ever have questions or comments, don’t hesitate to contact us.

  4. Mike says:
    January 7, 2009 at 7:12 am

    No problem Karlton! Pretty cool the way these media server tools are interacting with our entertainment devices these days…making the use of online video streaming much easier to watch for the common person who just wants it on his TV and not his computer all the time.

  5. Carolyn says:
    February 23, 2009 at 7:09 pm

    Thank you so much for this info; I’d found some similar info on the Satellite guys website, but your explanation of how to set it up was so much easier to follow. I spent about 5 minutes on the s/w install and am watching a Netflix movie right now. No need for the Roku box and I signed up for Hulu while I was at it. Thanks!!

  6. Germahl says:
    February 1, 2010 at 12:25 am

    I’d like to know the name of some of those new fangled “electric” devices that use your home’s internal electric network to pipe your information over. So I can check them out. I’m hooking up DirecTV HD and want to start streaming web video. Thanks for the info

  7. Shelia Menard says:
    July 17, 2010 at 12:16 pm

    Is there any software, like Playon, for the Macintosh?

  8. Andy D says:
    August 30, 2010 at 6:57 pm

    If anyone has doubts about the service don’t. I don’t work for anyone connected to playon or media mall. I have an xbox 360, ps3, iPhone 4, and direct tv dvr. Although I haven’t tried on direct tv yet it work very good on everything else. Even the Beta media player work incredible. Don’t pay full price, get the free trial and let it run out. I let it run out and got another free trail offer and signed up for it again. After about 3 days with the second free trial I was offered a license for 20 dollars. Worth every cent.

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