My parents have a DirecTv receiver which you can record video and do other things(similar to TiVo), and it died. I decided to snatch the hard drive and hook it up to my PC. I can open the hdd and look at the files, however, all of the videos are in the ".str" format, which I do not have a codec for.

Can anyone point me in the right direction on what to do?

http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html

It says *.str is a Playstation file..?

Did you try VLC?

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

Boot a Linux live-CD and run "file /path/to/filename". With any luck they are just renamed commonly used files.

wmp would still play it

Wmp did not play the files. My parents sent it back, without really giving me a chance to save the files. Oh well...