Vista Media Center “Restricted Content” error on Live TV
I’ve been using Windows Media Center on my primary television for several years now. First, with Windows XP Media Center Edition and now Windows Vista Home Premium. Until recently, the old Pentium 4 2.8Ghz (478-pin) with 2GB of RAM and an Nvidia FX5200 AGP video card was running fine. Unfortunately, the video card driver started crashing frequently and I had to replace it with an ATI HD2400 (the only AGP card available in local stores). Switching to an ATI card meant that the Nvidia PureVideo decoder couldn’t off-load some of the decoding to the video card anymore. Video playback would get choppy on very rare occassions but it was still annoying. Finally I decided to replace the internals of the system and jump to a motherboard that supported PCI Express. I had a spare ASUS P5WD2 Premium laying around, so I dropped that in with a Pentium 4 3.4Ghz (775-pin) CPU. I also recovered an Nvidia 6600GT from storage and added that into the mix. I kept the same hard drive as before (Western Digital 250GB with 16MB buffer) as I didn’t want to reinstall Vista, lose my settings, recording schedule, etc.
After the upgrade, my wife and I started to notice that we couldn’t watch anything on the Encore channels anymore. After 2 or so minutes watching those channels, playback would stop and an error message would appear on screen saying:
“Restricted Content - Restrictions set by the broadcaster or the originator of the content prohibit playback of this program on this computer.”
After some searching on Google, I found this problem was caused by my hardware upgrades and the DRM licenses on the system needed to refreshed. I found links to the following Microsoft knowledgebase articles:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/913800
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929642
Both of them didn’t mention my problem exactly, but other users had reported success in using the article to solve similar problems.
Unfortunately for me, neither solved my problem. Clearing out on the files under C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\DRM? Didn’t change anything. Upgrading the DRM security components at http://drmlicense.one.microsoft.com/Indivsite/en/indivit.asp?force=1? That didn’t even work. The “Upgrade” button was unclickable and the page reported a Javascript error.
Since I knew this was a DRM issue, I decided to load up the Zune software and see how that would handle my DRM issue. After installing the software and logging into my Zune account, I received more error messages when trying to download any music. But I had a feeling I was getting closer to a solution. The Zune software was giving me an error code: C00D12F5. After a quick search on the Zune support boards I had found a solution:
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink?linkid=105000
Follow that link to download an executable named ResetDRM.exe. Running this program will reset the DRM licenses on your system. If you have previously recorded TV programs, I’ve been warned that you may not be able to watch them after resetting your DRM licenses. I would assume this applies mostly to content recorded from premium channels like HBO. I had a handful of recorded programs from network stations and didn’t have a problem.
