Recovering Media Center Recordings

[McGary]

I recently had a hard drive failure, and easily replaced it and restored all the recordings from a backup.
But this got me to thinking ….

Media Center marks all the protected content so it will only play back on the system it was recorded on.

Is there a way to recover those recordings if that system itself fails (i.e. a motherboard failure) ?? Clearly that's fairly low on the likely failure list -- hard drives, power supplies, memory, are easy to recover from and don't impact the actual system. But it does happen.

Does anyone know if WMC is set up on a Win7 VM if this VM can then be run under different hosts without issue? That's one way to eliminate the potential issue here -- although doing so at this stage I'd still lose access to thousands of recordings unless there's a way to move those to a new WMC install.

[jachin99]

Before worrying too much about all of that, make sure that your recordings are marked as copy once. Typically this is only found on premium channels like hbo, starz, etc. Some cable companies mark all of their channels copy once, and I'm not sure if yours is one of them. For normal cablecard or OTA recordings you probably don't have anything to worry about. With that being said, the VM might be a good idea for preserving those recordings IF the VMs are exact clones of each other. I don't how that would work out but others here might have more experience with that kind of thing. If I were to persue that router I think I would use VMWare over hyper-v or virtual box because of the VM video memory limitations.

[McGary]

Unfortunately Time Warner (now Spectrum) has for years marked everything Copy Once -- so virtually everything we have recorded has the protection issue.

VMWare would definitely be my preferred VM. I do know that VMs can be freely moved to different hardware systems and still preserve their activation status -- I've tested this with virtually every version of Windows. But I haven't tried it with WMC, so I'm not certain if PlayReady settings would also be preserved. I was hoping somebody had already tried this and could report on their results.

[Space]

Here is a thread on DRM and VMs (with a link to another thread indicating that a hardware change broke DRM):
viewtopic.php?t=10108

Also this post seems to indicate that a hardware change will break DRM on WMC that is running in a VM.

[McGary]

Yes, the post about PlayReady issues when moving a VM to a new host isn't encouraging. I guess I'll simply have to try this "one of these days". If/when I do I'll post the results here. Basically I'll just set up a Win7 VM with WMC using one of my networked tuners and record a few programs; then move it to a different host and see if I can play the recordings. I was just hoping somebody else had done exactly that. It does seem like RyC tried this about 4 years ago ["... Well actually I've tried migrating my WMC VM to a different host to try exactly that and PlayReady broke. But if you want to try it out, I'd be curious to see if it works for you …"] … but it's not clear what his VM host was. I plan to try it with a VMWare host [Workstation running under Win10], which I know can move VM's without breaking activation … but I'm not sure whether PlayReady might be less tolerant.