Details about protected content playback errors in Update Rollup 2 for Media Center 2005

Hotfix designed to fix this problem

 

There is a new hotfix available as of 4/14/2006 that is designed to fix protected content playback issues in Update Rollup 2 for Media Center 2005. Please try out this hotfix if you have DRM/protected content playback issues in Update Rollup 2.

 

How to check for a protected content playback error code

If you are encountering a problem playing protected content on Windows XP Media Center 2005 after installing Update Rollup 2, or if you would like to check to see if you have a potential problem, you can use the steps in this blog post to download and play a sample Windows Media Audio file on your Media Center.

If you have a protected content playback problem, you will see a Windows Media Player error dialog with a Secure Storage Protection Error message. If you encounter any such error, please take note of the exact error code value and error message text received.

How to gather log file information from an affected machine

In addition to the error code information gathered above, it is useful to gather the following information from a system in order to narrow down the cause of protected content playback problems in Update Rollup 2. You can use the following steps to gather this data:

  1. Download and install the Windows XP SP2 Support tools

  2. Click on the Start menu, choose Run and type cmd

  3. Run the following commands to gather file version information for some of the files on your system:

    %ProgramFiles%\Support Tools\filever.exe %windir%\system32\blackbox.dll > %temp%\drm_files_log.txt
    %ProgramFiles%\Support Tools\filever.exe %windir%\system32\drmclien.dll >> %temp%\drm_files_log.txt
    %ProgramFiles%\Support Tools\filever.exe %windir%\system32\drmv2clt.dll >> %temp%\drm_files_log.txt
    %ProgramFiles%\Support Tools\filever.exe %windir%\system32\wmp.dll >> %temp%\drm_files_log.txt
    %ProgramFiles%\Support Tools\filever.exe %windir%\system32\wmvcore.dll >> %temp%\drm_files_log.txt

    echo "***************WMSETUP***************" >> %temp%\drm_files_logs.txt
    type %windir%\wmsetup.log >> %temp%\drm_files_logs.txt

    echo "***************WMSETUP10***************" >> temp%\drm_files_logs.txt
    type %windir%\wmsetup10.log >> %temp%\drm_files_logs.txt

    echo "***************SETUPAPI***************" >> %temp%\drm_files_logs.txt
    type %windir%\setupapi.log >> %temp%\drm_files_logs.txt

Note - you can copy the commands above and paste them into the cmd prompt by highlighting the commands, pressing Ctrl + C, then right-clicking in the cmd prompt window and selecting Paste.

Possible workarounds

While we work on a hotfix to correct some of the protected content playback issues in Update Rollup 2, you may want to try the following workarounds to allow viewing of protected content.

Please note that these workarounds will reset your license store, so you will lose the ability to playback previously acquired protected content (which means that you will have to re-acquire a license from the content provider):

  1. Close all programs that are using digital rights management (DRM). This includes but is not limited to Windows Media Player and Media Center.

  2. Click on the Start menu, choose Run and type cmd

  3. Stop background Media Center processes by running net stop ehrecvr and net stop ehsched from the cmd prompt

  4. Delete the Windows Media DRM folder by running rd /s "%allusersprofile%\DRM" from the cmd prompt. If you receive any access denied errors, that means you still have processes running that are using DRM. If this happens, reboot the system and start these steps again.

  5. Re-install the latest DRM components from this location

  6. Re-install Update Rollup 2 for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 from this location

  7. Re-install KB908250 from this location

Possible causes

 

Nearly all of the cases of protected content playback errors that we have seen so far have been caused by installing Windows Media Player 10 after installing Update Rollup 2. This issue is described in more detail in this blog post. KB910393 is intended to fix this issue by blocking Windows Media Player 10 setup from running on your computer so that it will not revert the versions of some system files that affect protected content playback.

Some other cases are caused by installing the Windows Media codec pack after installing Update Rollup 2. In this scenario, you will receive an error message stating that an audio codec could not be found when trying to play protected content.

Other cases of this issue are triggered by hardware changes on the computer in question. There is a built-in check for various hardware components, and if enough of them change, the computer is recognized as a new system and a new license must be acquired for the content.

We have seen a few other sporadic instances of protected content playback errors, and in those cases we haven’t been able to establish a pattern or root cause yet. In those cases, gathering the error code and log file information listed above could be useful to us to help narrow down the problem. 

 

<update date="4/15/2006"> Added a link to a new DRM hotfix that is now available in case people find and read some of my older blog posts in an attempt to fix this type of issue </update>