Protecting/copying DRM Licensing data for now OS Install

[chobe]

Until the people at Silicon Dust get the licensing figured out for recording and playback of DRM protected channels, I'll stick with my Win7 Media Center setup.

My Win7 install is showing signs of corruption that sfc /scannow will not fix - I need to reinstall Windows 7. Problem is I have library of 200+ DRM file I don't want to lose. I'm a bit confused by number of posts saying that copying playready license data and overwriting new info should restore ability to playback all files but I not sure about "what" files and if that is truly all that is necessary.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated!

[Space]

You will not be able to playback old DRM protected (CopyOnce) videos if you reinstall Windows, period.

If you have an old image backup of your system disk (from before any corruption), you can restore that and it will work if you copy the existing C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\PlayReady\mspr.hds file from the corrupted Win7 to the newly restored image.

You can find discussion here.

[adam1991]

Until the people at Silicon Dust get the licensing figured out for recording and playback of DRM protected channels

Will never happen. The hurdles for that are incredibly expensive.

Your choice for DRM content is cableco DVR, Tivo, or switch to something like YouTube TV.

[DavidinCT]

Until the people at Silicon Dust get the licensing figured out for recording and playback of DRM protected channels, I'll stick with my Win7 Media Center setup.

My Win7 install is showing signs of corruption that sfc /scannow will not fix - I need to reinstall Windows 7. Problem is I have library of 200+ DRM file I don't want to lose. I'm a bit confused by number of posts saying that copying playready license data and overwriting new info should restore ability to playback all files but I not sure about "what" files and if that is truly all that is necessary.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated!

Anyway about it, and what you try.. MAKE SURE YOU DO A FULL OS DRIVE BACKUP. I would already have done this if I was having issues.

When you say corruption, is this the drive the OS is on, or is Windows just broken someplace ?

[chobe]

Thanks for the quick response. By corruption I mean a problem with unknow system drivers....machine takes up to 8 minutes to fully reboot. I get no errors, but responsiveness of relative new machine w/i5 cpu 16gb memory, is terrible. because I'm using older tv as monitor, I cannot see boot data because of resolution issue but WMC has been working fine - all recordings playback without incident. So if I understand Space's comment, copying license data only works on a disk image and not a new install or upgrade - correct?

[Space]

Don't know about an upgrade, but a fresh install would create a new unique ID for the system which will make it look like a new system as far a PlayReady is concerned, so old DRM recordings will not play back on it.

Note that the disk image that needs to be made and restored must include all special partitions on the system disk, not just the partition with the C: drive.