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Update: If you have a Vista Media Center PC, you can also try the MyNetflix plugin.

Netflix, ah how I hate your DRM. I recently upgraded my PC to Vista Ultimate to get at the new Media Center interface (which IS better than MCE 2005) and thus my saga with Netflix DRM began.

As a new Netflix customer, one of the primary reasons that I signed on was for the “Watch Now” feature. Realizing the quality might not be the best, I thought that it would at least satisfy my wife’s need for instant gratification (and my own). After the first go round, and after using the “ResetDRM” (resetdrm.exe) utility provided by Netflix, my Media Center was no longer able to play any content off of it’s internal tuners (or any previously recorded material). That was Round One of Netflix borking my PC.

Round Two involved a complete reinstall of Vista, and proceeding to do nothing else but install the Netflix player. Again, I was prompted to use the “ResetDRM” (resetdrm.exe) utility (which I was not in the mood to do). Deciding to instead call customer support this time, I was politely told that because I only have my Media Center connected to a television, that Netflix was kind of enough to think that I want to record all of their DRM’d media. The work around from Netflix? Hook a monitor up to my Media Center. Why would I want to do that when I have a perfectly good plasma TV to use as a monitor? This lead to Round Three.

Round Three is the convoluted work around. After receiving numerous errors related to C00D11B1 errors from Windows Media Player, a thought came to mind. I opened a remote desktop session on to my Media Center, navigated to the movie I wanted to watch, and proceeded to let it run. Not surprising, due to the different graphics output of a terminal services session, the movie was able to play. Now, all I had to do was go back to the TV, log in to the session, and click the play button. Success! Netflix “Watch Now” on a TV!

Now tell me that isn’t absolutely assinine…