HDCP Support Required

I recently switched back from utilizing my XBOX360 as a Windows Media Center extender as my primary display device provider,  to a HDMI connection to my Home Theater PC (HTPC). My television is a Samsung HP-T5064 plasma, which supports High Definition Content Proction (HDCP) over HDMI. The motherboard in my HTPC is a MSI 785GM-P45 with an Integrated Graphics Processor (IGP)ATI Radeon HD 4200. After reconfiguring my setup with the direct HDMI connection between the HTPC and the television, I began to get very frustrated a I continued to receive the “HDCP Support Required”  error in Media Center when trying to view Live TV on a HS cable channel. This was also accompanied by missing audio over the HDMI cable. I attempted updating the system/chipset drivers which included the display driver. This did not solve the problem, much to my dismay. So off googling I went when I stumbled upon someone stating they had tweaked a setting in their BIOS to improve performance of their IGP. The Shared Memory setting, which determines how much of your system memory is shared with the on-board graphics IGP could be set manually. My setting was currently set to Auto. I changed this to 512, which will allow the IGP to access 512MB of memory. I rebooted the machine and was very pleased to hear the welcome chime of Windows Media Center. I quickly switched to LiveTv, changed the channel to Fox Sports Detroit and was please to be presented with the stunning image up Comerica Park and the post game show from the Tiger’s game. Hopefully this can help someone else who was pulling their hair out with the dreaded HDCP Support Required error.

2 thoughts on “HDCP Support Required”

  1. Well I owe you a HUGE debt of gratitude! I was pulling my eyebrows out — literally a habit of mine when I get highly stressed! Haha.

    THANK YOU SOOOOO MUCH for the posting. I had no idea that video memory would affect HDCP and had been fooling with the thing for a couple hours. I had it set to 64 MB, so I jumped it up to 128 and EUREKA! There was some lag in graphic-intense video, so I knocked it up to 256 and all is working WONDERFULLY!

    Glad someone takes the time to put this kind of information out there!

  2. Well, I spoke too soon. I was still having intermittent issues with the HDCP. I did a little more BIOS tweaking and found that INCREASING the PCI Latency helped. It defaulted to 64, so I moved it to 32 and Media Center wouldn’t even pick up the tuner card. I then moved it up to 96 and BINGO.

    I hope this solution continues to work without hiccup!

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