Sunday 16 December 2012

Lovefilm Instant Silverlight DRM problems - Title Unavailable

To combat the long, dark, cold and wet winter nights I've been giving Lovefilm Instant a try.  Now despite the really poor selection of movies which seem to have been mainly picked by a group of adolescent boys (I mean, Porn Shoot Masacre and The Gore Gore Girls, really?!).  There are still enough decent films and TV shows to keep me interested, that was at least until Silverlight broke.


If you're reading this you're probably suffering from the same problem:

All Lovefilm Instant titles show up as "Title Unavailable"

My setup: SilverLight 5.1 running on Windows 8 Professional.

I tried the obvious things:

  • Clearing my browser cache
  • Clearing the Application Storage for Lovefilm.com from the Silverlight Configuration Application
  • Ensuring (and toggling) the Digital Rights Mangement (DRM) checkbox from the Silverlight config app
  • Removing the DRM licence file: %ProgramData%\Microsoft\PlayReady\mspr.hds
  • Completely removing Silverlight all together
  • Various combinations of the above including reboots.
None of this worked for me.  Lovefilm was still constantly showing everything as "Title Unavailable".
Eventually I came across a fix which worked for me:

  • Start Internet Explorer as Administrator (even if IE is understandably not your go to browser).
  • Open: http://goo.gl/CXk2O which is a page from Microsoft that detects and upgrades some security components in Windows Media Player (version 12 in my case).
Once I'd done this update Lovefilm started working again no problem in my normal Chrome browser.  Now I just need to hunt out the few good films amongst all the crap!
Hope this helps someone!