Protected Content with Media Center

by Jason Prahl | Jun 16, 2006 | Blog, Computer Tips, Microsoft Windows

DRM keeps poking up it’s ugly head, and it’s really beginning to irk me. I mainly use Windows Media Center to record HBO movies. I had about 9 or so recorded, and today I’m sick, so I thought it would be a perfect time to watch some of them, but what do you know, none of them work. I tried my main PC running Media Center, and the Media Center Extender in the front room. Both give an an error saying it’s protected content and won’t let me watch any of them!

I read about people running into issues after installing Update Rollup 2 for Media Center 2005, because Rollup 2 installs an updated Digital Rights Management (DRM) package. I’ve had the Rollup 2 installed for months with no problems, and now all of a sudden I’m getting this protected content crap!

I found this statement on Microsoft’s website. The Microsoft Windows Media Digital Rights Management (DRM) system may not work if you make changes to your computer hardware.

So basically if certain components are changed in your PC, like I changed out a hard drive, Windows Media DRM may not work because it views the change as an unauthorized attempt to move protected content to another computer. Crap like this makes me want to pirate everything, and not purchase anything legally anymore. I’m paying for HBO, and I can’t even record it! Ahhh.

So for the others who may run into this problem, here’s the fix, courtesy of Aaron Stebner. Be sure to back up any licenses to protected content first, and then perform the following steps:

1. Close Media Center and Windows Media Player.
2. Click Start, Run. In the Open box, type cmd and click OK to open a Command Prompt window. At the command prompt, enter the command net stop ehrecvr and press Enter.
3. Click Start, Run. In the Open box, type %allusersprofile%\drm and Press Enter.
4. In the Windows Explorer window for the DRM folder, choose Tools, Folder Options. Click the View tab and select the Show hidden files and folders option and then clear the Hide protected operating system files option. Click OK to close the Folder Options dialog box.
5. Click in the Windows Explorer window for the DRM folder, press Ctrl+A to select all files, and press Delete.
6. Optional: Reverse the settings in Step 4.
7. Visit the following Web page: http://go.microsoft.com/FWLink?LinkID=34506 and click the button that allows you to upgrade Windows DRM components.
8. Restart your computer.
9. Optional: Restore any backed-up licenses.

Taskpad view in Windows Server MMC

by Jason Prahl | Jun 15, 2006 | Blog, Computer Tips, Microsoft Windows

Ok, if you are a long time Windows Server administrator and already know about taskpad view in the Windows MMC you might skip reading this, or at least refrain from making fun of me for not knowing about this sooner. I just found this feature today, so it’s totally new to me and really cool. I’m not sure how many versions back this has been in, but I’m running Windows Server 2003.

It all started because I wanted to find an easy way to let specific users unlock domain accounts easily. I found this article on Microsoft’s support site about delegating the ability to unlock accounts to a group or user. Then I found some scripts for unlocking domain accounts. On one of the sites I was on they talked about adding the scripts to the taskpad view.

What on earth is the taskpad view was my first question. So I went back to the MMC and started poking around. I had long ago found the usefullness of setting up a custom MMC control panel and had added the Active Directory Users and Computers, DHCP, Exchange and other snap-ins. If you aren’t familiar with this, you first need to have the Server Admin pak installed. The Windows Server 2003 admin pak can be found here. It can be used to manage Windows 2000 or 2003 servers. If you want to do the exchange functions you need to install the exchange management console from the Exchange installation CD. Then you can goto Start/Run and type MMC. You’ll get an empty MMC console. Goto File/Add Remove Snap-in where you can add the various snap-ins. You can add a ton of useful tools here ranging from Active Directory Users and Computers to SQL Server Enterprise Manager to DNS to DHCP. You name a Microsoft Server function and you can add a snap-in for it.
You can save this custom MMC and make a shortcut to it for whenever you need these functions. Now, for the part I just discovered. Once you have a snap-in in the MMC you can then goto Action/New Taskpad View. This will add a blank area where you can add shortcuts to specific tasks like Create New User, Find etc. See the above screenshot where I’ve added several tasks. These tasks allow you to add the standard menu options or you can also add scripts and executables. This is where I added scripts to unlock users or enable and disable user accounts. The cool thing about these tasks is that you can add parameters that get fed to the scripts. For instance I can click on a user in the right pane then click unlock users and the username of the user I have selected can be fed to a VBScript that unlocks users.

I used the instructions from this article to create my unlock, enable and disable user account tasks. I had to do some tweaking of the instructions but with some playing and testing you can come up with the right scripts. Here are the three scripts I ended up with, you need to edit each of them replacing the text that says “your domain here” with your domain. There are an unlimited amount of tasks you can add to these views and you can put your most used tasks where you can get to them quickly.