Whole house DRM options for Recorded TV?

[CZ Eddie]

I'm thinking about setting up a 24/7 virtual machine running Win7MCE to act as a video server to the entire house.
Clients will be a mix of HTPC and Xbox 360's.

If the WMC server records some DRM protected content via my HDhomeRun, are there options to stream that recording to the extenders?
And if so, is it possible to send a live recording to multiple extenders at the same time?
Such as when watching a live sports game on ESPN, I can stream that viewing to all the extenders in my house at the same time?

Everything will be hard wired with Cat6 and HDMI.
All extenders, etc, on a 1GbE LAN.

[jziggity]

Everything you are looking to do is possible with this setup, as long as clients are true extenders (XBox 360's or older Linksys devices). This is exactly how I run my home system right now, save for the virtual machine part. The main desktop PC in the house runs Windows 7 WMC. There are 4 XBox 360's in various rooms throughout the house, with the main PC and all extenders connected via CAT6 ethernet. Tuners are 2 HDHR Primes on the same network. The main desktop machine (despite its age of nearly 6 years) doesn't break a sweat when recording 6 HD cable streams at the same time. I have Spectrum cable (soon switching to OTA), and they lock just about everything down with DRM.

The magic of WMC is that it is still currently the only non-cable company provided DVR solution that will allow recording of DRM content, and pushing said recordings back out to multiple rooms via extenders. I think Silicondust might be getting close to this, but not quite there yet. You will NOT be able to view DRM content in another room via a different HTPC, as the DRM protection will not allow that. Since XBox extenders actually log in to the main PC with accounts created when they are set up, they can play back DRM content, because it is technically being played from the same PC still, and pushed out to the extender.

So yes, a WMC/extender setup will allow you to view DRM content in multiple rooms.
Yes, you can send the same live stream to multiple extenders at the same time. Even better - when doing this, you are only using one tuner on the HDHR Prime. You don't have to worry about using up multiple tuners to stream the same live channel to multiple extenders. I have done this several times.

I'm not sure how running all of this on a virtual machine would work, as I have never dabbled in that at all.

If you are just joining the WMC world, you are a little late to the game, with the "end of life" for Windows 7 coming up in January 2020. I plan to ride this gravy train all the way out though... Good luck!

[CZ Eddie]

Great post, thank you!

[DavidinCT]

Great post, thank you!

So you know, by default, I believe you can have 7-10 extenders but, only 5 can be running at one time. I believe there is a hack for this but, off the top of my head I am not 100% sure. It was available from Microsoft for custom builders. Those days are long gone.