So, Digging through another drive, i thought i saw a folder i hadnt seen before, Turns out, -I have seen it before, i just enver opened it.
If we open this folder we a refrence to a bunch of  stuff related to Ucentric. Upon doing some research, it appears the company no longer exists, and I found a SEC document on the interwebs.

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1088825/000119312505077754/d10k.htm

There's a link to it, for anyone who wants to laminate their eyes with this small print text and legal jargon.

The only particularly interesting thing ive seen is that the ucentric contract ended and they went to NDS ...
"Our current development agreement with DIRECTV expires in February 2007. Afterwards, while DIRECTV will have the option to continue to service the existing DIRECTV receivers with TiVo service without further payment to us, it will not be able to add new DIRECTV receivers with TiVo service unless DIRECTV elects either to purchase a royalty-bearing technology license from us or to renew or replace our current agreement.

DIRECTV has recently announced that its core initiatives and new customer acquisition will focus on its new DVR from NDS. We expect that our DIRECTV subscription growth rate may decline in the future."

 
I then on a forum found this gem of info :
https://web.archive.org/web/20240811035349/https://www.dbstalk.com/threads/directv-nds.116372/

NDS did the work on the R15/16

DirecTV did the work on the HR20/21

And They have just renewed thier contract with NDS as well. Well, I say Just renewed.. it was renewed back in 2011, and i have learned that they use a system called NDS VideoGuard, which is so "secure" it has never been fully hacked.
https://web.archive.org/web/20221018233539/https://blog.solidsignal.com/tutorials/what-is-videoguard/


I hate to burst their bubble, nothing is secure. Everything made by man will fail.

I figure with enough research , we could possibly breakthrough this system, not to recover the video files, but to see what filesystems are used on these DVRs