PlayReady Issues

godman114

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#41

Post by godman114 » Thu Mar 05, 2020 11:50 pm

seang86s wrote: Thu Mar 05, 2020 10:52 pm I have both. My legacy install (installed circa 2014) running on bare metal uses a Ceton InfiniTV6 PCIe but that has worked throughout this entire time (mainly because nothing has changed hardware-wise). My working VM and my non-working VMs are all using HDHomeRun Primes (4 of them). My non-working VMs (Windows 7 and Windows 8.1) are now working as of 4:30PM EST and if I kept other VMs that I created for troubleshooting that were not working, they would probably work now as well.

It has nothing to do with the kind of cablecard hardware you're running. The issue was solely PlayReady. I'll explain later how it was fixed when I receive more info. In the meantime, I'm hoping others can try to see if their newly built or existing machines that have been flagged as needing a PlayReady "update" are now working.
What do you mean are now working?
I have Windows updates and any auto updates disabled on the machine. I’ve got HD hd prime 3 network tuner also. On win10pro 64 1511 (although it may be feb 2016 version of 1500 build now). Everything installed and configured except playready fails.

trelf

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#42

Post by trelf » Fri Mar 06, 2020 12:28 am

seang86s wrote: Thu Mar 05, 2020 10:18 pm Hi folks. Please try activating Playready now and see if it works for you. I was able to activate a Windows 7 and a Windows 8.1 install.

Unfortunately, I'm doing this remotely so I haven't actually tried tuning in a Copy Once flagged channel yet.
PlayReady is completing, now, but I'm getting the "Display driver error" on my laptop (Lenovo X250). I'm headed out to pick up some dinner, and will give this a go on my desktop machine in a little bit. @seang86s, are you able to tune the copy protected chans, now?

seang86s

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#43

Post by seang86s » Fri Mar 06, 2020 1:27 am

godman114 wrote: Thu Mar 05, 2020 11:50 pm What do you mean are now working?
I have Windows updates and any auto updates disabled on the machine. I’ve got HD hd prime 3 network tuner also. On win10pro 64 1511 (although it may be feb 2016 version of 1500 build now). Everything installed and configured except playready fails.
I and a few folks on this thread use cablecard tuners with a cable provider that has channels marked as "Copy Once". If PlayReady does not install and activate correctly, you will not be able to view these channels. What I mean by "now working" is that those channels are viewable because PlayReady now activates. Installs done before 1/14/2020 would install and activate PlayReady without issue. Installs done after that date were failing and therefore could not view "Copy Once" channels up until today.

PlayReady activation happens once, when you first install a device that works with copy protected material. You usually don't have to go thru PlayReady activation again, except if enough hardware changes in your machine. So if you had a working setup before that January date, it would continue to work. If you took that working machine and made a change after that date, you would lose the ability to view copy protected material permanently. In my case, my Legacy Windows 7 install on bare metal worked as well as a VM I setup before the January date. The two VMs (and about 3 others I've since deleted during troubleshooting) that I built after the January date would fail to active PlayReady until today.

BTW, even with PlayReady not working "Copy Free" and OTA channels worked fine. That was a non-issue.

seang86s

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#44

Post by seang86s » Fri Mar 06, 2020 2:05 am

trelf wrote: Fri Mar 06, 2020 12:28 am PlayReady is completing, now, but I'm getting the "Display driver error" on my laptop (Lenovo X250). I'm headed out to pick up some dinner, and will give this a go on my desktop machine in a little bit. @seang86s, are you able to tune the copy protected chans, now?

Confirmed. My Windows 7 VM which couldn't activate PlayReady until today can now view "Copy Once" channels. Looks like we may be back in business. Hopefully others can confirm?

jeepman

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#45

Post by jeepman » Fri Mar 06, 2020 2:14 am

seang86s wrote: Fri Mar 06, 2020 2:05 am
trelf wrote: Fri Mar 06, 2020 12:28 am PlayReady is completing, now, but I'm getting the "Display driver error" on my laptop (Lenovo X250). I'm headed out to pick up some dinner, and will give this a go on my desktop machine in a little bit. @seang86s, are you able to tune the copy protected chans, now?

Confirmed. My Windows 7 VM which couldn't activate PlayReady until today can now view "Copy Once" channels. Looks like we may be back in business. Hopefully others can confirm?
So I am able to view Live TV, but since I am on a VM and I forced a pass on DCA, I am getting the Display Driver error, but I was not getting that far before. I am going to do a bare metal install soon on a spare drive, but I won't have a full report until late into the weekend. I will be pining for an install gone right, while I repair a dishwasher I bought off of Nextdoor.com to replace a failing dishwasher!!!

seang86s

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#46

Post by seang86s » Fri Mar 06, 2020 2:22 am

Do you have an extender? I get a Display Driver error as well on the VM which is to be expected but my intention is to use Extenders for viewing.

The Ceton echo extender didn't throw a copy protected channel error this time and I was able to view the channel.

jeepman

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#47

Post by jeepman » Fri Mar 06, 2020 2:36 am

seang86s wrote: Fri Mar 06, 2020 2:22 am Do you have an extender? I get a Display Driver error as well on the VM which is to be expected but my intention is to use Extenders for viewing.

The Ceton echo extender didn't throw a copy protected channel error this time and I was able to view the channel.
I REMEMBERED THE OLD TRICK OF MINIMIZE AND MAXIMIZE! I have Live TV again!!! In a VM even!!! Thank you for whatever you did to get this working!

godman114

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#48

Post by godman114 » Fri Mar 06, 2020 3:35 am

jeepman wrote: Fri Mar 06, 2020 2:36 am
seang86s wrote: Fri Mar 06, 2020 2:22 am Do you have an extender? I get a Display Driver error as well on the VM which is to be expected but my intention is to use Extenders for viewing.

The Ceton echo extender didn't throw a copy protected channel error this time and I was able to view the channel.
I REMEMBERED THE OLD TRICK OF MINIMIZE AND MAXIMIZE! I have Live TV again!!! In a VM even!!! Thank you for whatever you did to get this working!
I literally just logged on to say just that. Mine still do that, especially my VM (windows 7 VM).
Those of you with VMs, if you're using the ESXi hypervisor and a motherboard that can do IOMMU, you do know you can passthrough a physical video card directly to the VM and have a full-blown "physicalized VM" computer, right?
I do that with USB passthrough and HDMI passthrough. Pass cat6 through my walls to a bedroom. No computer in the bedroom, just cables coming out of wall to the TV. I have a wireless USB receiver there and an HDMI/Cat6 extender, so that HDMI plugs directly into TV, and wireless USB goes to the VM. Runs like a champ. Hit me up if interested. Love that setup.

My gripe these days is swapping my old HTPC (w7) with this new mini desktop I bought (w10). About to try PlayReady yet again... wish me luck. Right now I'm building out my epg123 client.

Space

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#49

Post by Space » Fri Mar 06, 2020 3:37 am

seang86s wrote: Thu Mar 05, 2020 10:52 pm ...
I'll explain later how it was fixed when I receive more info.
...
Thanks

godman114

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#50

Post by godman114 » Fri Mar 06, 2020 4:02 am

Wow this is a poopshow!
Finished configuring epg123, launched WMC live tv and it gave the display driver error. I maximize the window and machine went black and unresponsive. Rebooted. Second attempt same thing, but this time I was able to CTRL+SHIFT+ESC and end task. Soon after I got a warning about the AMD Display driver failing. Tried again and Windows 10 bluescreen about one of the ATI drivers. Wow...

I'm losing hope man... May have to give it all up and move down to Windows 8.1. I just don't know how well this desktop is going to take older versions of Windows.
Desktop is a ThinkCenter M75q with a 3400G / Vega 11 chip.

mce99

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#51

Post by mce99 » Fri Mar 06, 2020 5:36 am

It's working! I didn't do anything. I just tuned in to a DRM channel and it worked.The Update PlayReady option under TV ... TV Signal was no longer there.
My system is HDHR Prime with Windows 8.1 Pro. It was a clean install.

jeepman

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#52

Post by jeepman » Fri Mar 06, 2020 5:52 am

mce99 wrote: Fri Mar 06, 2020 5:36 am It's working! I didn't do anything. I just tuned in to a DRM channel and it worked.The Update PlayReady option under TV ... TV Signal was no longer there.
My system is HDHR Prime with Windows 8.1 Pro. It was a clean install.
Awesome, the evidence builds that this may have been a glitch and I hope to read even just a short summary of what may have been the root cause.

jamf

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#53

Post by jamf » Fri Mar 06, 2020 12:21 pm

Also having success with a new Win8.1 TV setup after Playready failures last weekend. Thanks all for tracking the issue. I did reinstall "Playready PC runtime AMD64" from technodevotee's website prior to my successful setup but I don't know if that was necessary.

godman114

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#54

Post by godman114 » Sat Mar 07, 2020 12:10 am

I've got my setup working now, I think.
Yesterday I formatted yet again and started all over.
I installed everything fresh, and was able to get playready to install on its own. I did have to install digital cable advisor separately. Running w10b1511 hdhrprime 3 network tuner, hdhr 2015 setup. Everything went through fine, even epg123, but then when I tried to watch live TV I'd get absolutely nothing. I tried HDHR Prime View, and it wouldn't load.

Reinstalled HDHR 2015 setup, and Prime view still doesn't load, but now WMC live tv works. I do have to do the maximize window trick at times to get TV to show up and not give me the display driver error.
Now my audio doesn't work... 1511 drivers aren't available for this desktop so i'm doing everything I can do frankenstein this together. I have some hope. Man, what a pain!!

trelf

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#55

Post by trelf » Sat Mar 07, 2020 10:37 pm

I pulled out my desktop machine, last night, and was able to get right through the TV signal setup process. When completed, I was able to tune all channels, no problem. Finishing up with EPG123, everything is all set, and I couldn't be happier! Definitely making an image of my drive, today.

@seang86s, what wizardry was performed to achieve this?!

Also, thanks to everyone who participated in this thread. It's very much appreciated!

-T

seang86s

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#56

Post by seang86s » Sun Mar 08, 2020 5:14 am

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?

godman114

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#57

Post by godman114 » Mon Mar 09, 2020 2:18 pm

Just an update for you guys. I struggled a lot with this new mini PC (Lenovo ThinkCentre M75q-1), but finally have it working with one caveat. When I run WMC maximized on my 65" 4K, the screen goes out every few seconds, then comes back, and repeats. I have a strong feeling it's either the HDMI cable, or the refresh rate from WMC not matching up with my 4K monitor. At first, the issue was that everything in WMC looked like crap (choppy), and I realized it was the fact that when I set up 4K resolution in Windows, it defaulted to 30hz (eww). Setting it to 59hz or 60hz in Windows makes everything look smooth again.

I went through the WMC display set up and tried 59.94hz setting and 60hz setting... still struggling to get this to work. If I run WMC in windowed mode, I have absolutely no problems (but that's not acceptable, just temporary). If I run Kodi (v18), I don't seem to have an issue (yet)... feel like this could creep up on me also. I watched 4K videos over 1GB from my file server like champ. Again, either I need a new HDMI cable or I have to mess more with the refresh rates. Anyone seen this before?

To sum up my finally working setup (seriously had to do a lot of tinkering to get this to work on this model PC, namely because there are NO DRIVERS for b1511 for this model desktop). I had to play with different AMD drivers as Lenovo didn't have any drivers for b1511. I had to manually browse the driver files from device manager to get bluetooth, wifi, etc. working. Here's my current (almost fully working) setup:
Lenovo ThinkCenter M75q-1 (Ryzen 5 3400G)
HDHR Network 3-Tuner with CableCard from Verizon FIOS
Windows 10 b1511 (stop updates installed, but only enabled after WMC setup was completed)
AMD Radeon Adrenaline 2020 20.1.3
Lenovo drivers manually injected via device manager (extracted the oldest drivers from website)
HDHR 2015 setup
WMC V-13
EPG123 Guide
Digital Cable Advisor (had to be manually installed and then ran)

Caveats:
1. AMD Display driver was failing when trying to get WMC full screen working correctly (refresh rate or HDMI issues)
2. Display Driver error comes up when WMC is first launched - must maximize/minimize window every time to resolve
3. Unable to run WMC in fullscreen mode yet -- could be related to issue #1 above

I may have to live with that display driver issue forever. I remember having this problem back in the day even on Windows 7... not sure if it's related to HDCP or not.

Fingers crossed that my new HDMI cable coming in today resolves all issues (wishful thinking). I picked up a DP to HDMI 4k Cable from Amazon.

jeepman

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#58

Post by jeepman » Mon Mar 09, 2020 5:43 pm

godman114 wrote: Mon Mar 09, 2020 2:18 pm ...
1. AMD Display driver was failing when trying to get WMC full screen working correctly (refresh rate or HDMI issues)
How is the audio supplied to your setup? If you are not relying audio via HDMI, can you disable it? In other words, if you have Optical out, try that for sound, and not use AMD's audio driver to see if it helps. May even be an issue with Media Center and AMD's audio driver.

trelf

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#59

Post by trelf » Tue Mar 10, 2020 12:07 pm

seang86s wrote: Sun Mar 08, 2020 5:14 am
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?
Dang it. Unfortunately, this only worked for a couple days. I just hooked my machine back up to my TV, and the PlayReady issue came right back. I'm stuck right back where I was, previously, and PR won't update. Are you, by chance, still talking to the people at MS? Thanks in advance.

jeepman

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#60

Post by jeepman » Tue Mar 10, 2020 12:29 pm

trelf wrote: Tue Mar 10, 2020 12:07 pm
Dang it. Unfortunately, this only worked for a couple days. I just hooked my machine back up to my TV, and the PlayReady issue came right back. I'm stuck right back where I was, previously, and PR won't update. Are you, by chance, still talking to the people at MS? Thanks in advance.
So I did a PlayReady install, and even a PlayReady Update in 8.1 MC at around 6PM CDT on Monday, so just about 13 hours ago based on the time of writing. I did not have to do much, except override Digital Cable Advisor because my Graphics failed the system test.

One note, I did NOT install any PlayReady standalone installer. I let Media Center's Setup TV Signal do everything after overriding DCA.

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