Ed Bott's Media Central

Here’s a quick follow-up to my Ouch! Bitten by DRM post from this morning.

I set up Media Center to record a movie on HBO Pacific at 9:30 MST. The movie in question? Wrongfully Accused, starring Leslie Neilsen, which sounds truly awful – the sacrifices I make in the name of science.

According to the Recorded TV list, Media Center recorded it just fine, but trying to play it back results in the dreaded “Restricted Content” error.

In fact, trying to watch any copy protected HBO content on this Media Center PC results in the same error after only a few seconds of viewing. I just tested using both tuners, and was unable to watch Miss Congeniality 2 on HBO Pacific or Jennifer Eight on HBO2. No great loss content-wise, but the bigger problem is making me very angry, to say the least.

For the most part, I use the DirecTiVo box in the living room to record HBO programming. It still works just fine. These days I mostly use the Media Center PC to record movies on unrestricted cable channels, including Comedy Central, American Movie Classics, and Turner Movie Classics. I assume this problem began occurring sometime on or before January 6, as that’s the first day when content I recorded from HBO turned out to be unwatchable. Last fall, I had no trouble watching HBO programming on this computer, so something has changed, and not for the better.

A post at Aaron Stebner’s blog, “Content protection errors in Update Rollup 2 for Media Center 2005″ offers a clue to the origin of the problem:

I have heard of several folks running into issues playing protected content (such as purchased songs/movies, or HBO television shows) after installing Update Rollup 2 for Media Center 2005. As I described here, Update Rollup 2 installs an updated Digital Rights Management (DRM) redistributable package. We are still investigating reports of content protection problems in order to identify root causes and provide fixes.

Aaron points to a Knowledge Base article, “The Windows Media Digital Rights Management system may not work if your computer hardware changes”, which identifies one possible cause of this problem:

The Microsoft Windows Media Digital Rights Management (DRM) system may not work if you make changes to your computer hardware. You may not be able to play protected content. Protected content includes content such as songs that you have bought and downloaded from an online store.

You may receive the following error messages:

• The license to play the packaged media is invalid.
• C00D277F – Secure storage protection error. Restore your licenses from a previous backup and try again.

This issue occurs because the Windows Media DRM system maintains information based on the hardware configuration of the computer. If certain components are changed, Windows Media DRM may not work because it may view the change as an unauthorized attempt to move protected content to another computer.

This issue may occur if you have made one or more of the following changes to your computer hardware:

• You recently changed hardware components, such as the CPU or the motherboard.
• You modified any one of your computer’s Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) settings that affect hardware components, such as disabling CPU hyper-threading.
• You moved the hard disk drive from one computer to another computer.

Well, that’s not the error I’m getting, but the underlying issue sounds familiar, especially given that I upgraded the hard drive on this machine last fall and used a disk imaging program to copy the contents of the old disk to the new one.

I’ll try resetting Windows Media DRM using the steps in the KB article. I’ll let you know how it works.

Update: Yep, that worked. But it required multiple steps that demanded more expertise than it is reasonable to expect any Windows user to go through. I didn’t bother backing up my licenses to see if my existing content would play back after the restoration. My guess is that it wouldn’t have worked.

DRM sucks.