Well, Colin said I should write more original material, so I haven’t posted all week.  See?  That’s what you get.

But last night something happened that actually gave me material to write.  I was watching TV with my fiancee and noticed that Real Time with Bill Maher was on HBO.  The show’s been on break for three months now, so I was fairly psyched.  When I switched to the channel, however, the video and sound cut out, and I was greeted with a screen carrying a “Restricted Content” warning.  Unfortunately, it looked like my viewing pleasure was to be dashed upon rocks of asinine industry.

Or was it?

Let me give you a little bit of background here.  I have a home-built Personal Video Recorder running Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005.  All my TV viewing first passes through this box to allow me to do cool things like pause and rewind my shows, and record them.  It’s somewhere on the hierarchy of coolness between consumer-friendly TiVo and uber-geeky Linux boxes running MythTV.

It has always done what I needed it to do, and never given me problems.  I had never received errors before, and have recorded HBO and Encore without any problems.

So I was surprised, needless to say. It had been my understanding that these broadcast flags were not to be implemented just yet, and that even when they were, it was only to prevent copying files from one computer to another.  I began fuming, repeatedly asserting that I would be calling Comcast this morning to cancel my subscription to HBO.

I also began to do some digging.  To be honest, my original intent was to simply find a hack or workaround to disable HBO’s pathetic attempt to control my viewing experience, one I pay exhorbitant sums for already.  What I ended up finding out was that maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t HBO’s fault.

I own an XBOX 360.  In fact, I managed to purchase it 48 hours after launch, thanks to Colin’s tireless efforts.  One of the neat features of the 360 is the way it can interface with a PC running XP MCE.  It does this through a piece of software installed on the PC called Windows Media Connect.  In order to install Windows Media Connect, you must first install Update Rollup 2 for Windows Media Center Edition 2005.

Well, apparently there is a problem with the Rollup.  A fairly well-documented one, from what I can see.  Apparently installing it can cause Windows Media Player 10 to overwrite certain DRM files.  Microsoft has a Knowledge Base Article here on a similar problem.

Yeah, noticed that, did you?  The article doesn’t appear to have anything to do with the problem I am relating.  As far as I can tell, Microsoft has no article detailing the precise (and again, very common) problem I am relating.  I could speculate why that is, but that would just lead me into another pointless rant.

What is important to note is that there is a fairly easy fix.  It’s detailed on this page, among numerous others easily found using your favorite search engine.

Oh, I meant it was fairly easy for an IT person.  Or perhaps a 14-year old hopped up on Red Bull and Doritos.  The point is, if you own a PC from HP or Dell with XP MCE 2005 on it and install Update Rollout 2 (which is part of Windows Update, so you might install it even without an XBOX 360), you could bork your TV viewing.

So do you blame HBO, or Microsoft?  If you answered “yes”, you are correct.  Goddamned DRM.  If HBO didn’t transmit the flag, the rollup wouldn’t affect you.  If Microsoft built better software, you wouldn’t see a problem with the DRM.

Until, of course, you tried to convert your recorded TV to some other format, such as DVD, or put it on another computer.