By accident, I realized I could stream videos/pictures from my computer to the TV through my Maestro cable box. I wrote before about how to disable the streaming of media from your computer: Disable Media Streaming For Privacy
Then I discovered another issue. If you keep streaming enabled, Maestro keeps showing a list of videos and pictures that were already deleted from the computer. My question was, how do I clear that list?
Remove Listings
I couldn’t find any setting on the cable box to clear out the list and Windows Explorer was showing the empty folders in question, so I had to go to tech support to figure out how to delete this list.
This is basically what they told me:
- If you are still seeing these videos and pictures, they would still be on the computer somewhere. If you are 100% sure they are completely off the computer, you will need to un-pair the computer from the box, then pair them up again.
- Access Settings on one of the media players. Then, select “Remove All Devices”. It should take about 30 seconds for that screen to clear.
I checked VLC and found no such settings. Then I opened Windows Media Player. In the menu on the left-hand side of the player, I noticed the name of my cable box and right-clicked and chose the option to Remove the device (sorry, no screen shot available). It was supposed to take about 30 seconds to work, but much later, the list was still there.
By clicking around on the menu in Movie Player, I discovered what to do. In the menu on the left-hand side I clicked on Videos— sure enough, I saw all the movies listed that were showing up on the cable box list. Right-clicking on them offers the option to delete them. A small window then opens giving the option to delete them only from the library, or to delete them from the library and the computer.
Deleting them from here removes them from the listing on the cable box. This works for both Pictures, Videos, and probably Music, too.
Note: Deleting from the library is like deleting a shortcut to a file, but not deleting the file itself.
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