trelf wrote: ↑Sat Mar 07, 2020 10:37 pm
@seang86s, what wizardry was performed to achieve this?!
TL;DR, I was able to engage Microsoft to look into the issue and they fixed it.
Long version:
I opened a ticket with Microsoft Premier Support and the issue bounced around a little among their normal, level 1 folks mainly because all three major components involved here (Windows 7, Media Center and PlayReady 1.3) were all out of support. My only saving grace was Windows 8.1 still has extended support until 1/2023. I eventually got someone on their Windows Media/Home team and was able to explain the problem to them. It turns out the server(s) that handle "Silverlight PlayReady individualization" had an expired certificate. By coincidence, it happened to be within a few days after Windows 7 support ended. Since Silverlight support ends in October 2021 (see
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/hel ... of-support), they renewed the cert and Silverlight activations started working again. PlayReady uses the same servers to activate as well which indirectly solved that issue. When PlayReady and Silverlight "individualize" they contact Microsoft's servers to get their key but if the SSL cert on the server (Microsoft's end) is not valid, the client does not trust the server and the process fails. It turns out the Microsoft person helping me with this issue has a colleague that was fielding a call with a customer with Silverlight individualization issues. It probably would have been fixed without my intervention and PlayReady would have magically started working for us anyway. From what I gather, the only reason they fixed this for us was nothing to do with Windows 7, Media Center or PlayReady but because of Silverlight is still supported until October 2021. PlayReady 1.3 just so happens to use the same infrastructure as Silverlight.
It's a safe bet that this specific issue for PlayReady should not happen again until Silverlight goes out of support. Even then, it may continue to run for another two years from around this date (3/2022) since that's how long the cert is good for, but that is not guaranteed. Microsoft may bring down those servers before the cert expires. For those of you who want to continue to run WMC beyond Octoober 2021, you might want to successfully activate a few machines or VMs to keep as a backup. Remember, a hardware change (even swapping out a defective motherboard for the same model) is enough to flag PlayReady to re-individualize. Just changing the amount of memory on my working VM also caused it to want to re-individualize. If you keep your hardware spec the same, PlayReady won't attempt to contact Microsoft and theoretically, could operate for years after the Silverlight infrastructure is taken offline.
One thing we can try is a newer version of PlayReady. I don't know any of the later versions will work with Media Center. Anyone here work with PlayReady from a development standpoint?