A maker turned a free DIRECTV HR54-700 Genie DVR into a standalone Jellyfin client by reusing its existing Linux stack, Broadcom BCM7346B2 hardware decoders, and HDMI output rather than rebuilding the OS. The box runs MIPS32 Linux with 1 GiB RAM and a 1 TB drive; the root filesystem stays read-only SquashFS while all changes live under /var and are restored at boot by a wrapper. A boot-plugin loader quirk was used to gain persistent root without flashing, and an OSD/satellite-blocking check (OSD 36 / extension 775) was removed so menus became usable without a dish.
Playback uses the receiver’s existing media pipeline: Jellyfin is asked for PlaybackInfo and forced to transcode to conservative MPEG‑TS streams (H.264 video + AC3 audio). A compact native backend (hr54-jf), cross-compiled for mips32, runs on the DVR to handle Quick Connect auth, Jellyfin API calls, stream relay, and transport commands; pause/resume is implemented by stopping and restarting the stream, seek by restarting the transcode. The UI is an ES5 WebKit ITV app tailored for remote navigation. Wi‑Fi was provisioned by writing a vendor NVRAM object with a simple checksum. The final device boots, joins Wi‑Fi, authenticates via Quick Connect, browses/searches, and plays media natively over HDMI with hardware decode - no dish, no helper PC.
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