You often find yourself needing to debug voucher retrieval code and policy settings on the back end server when building AIR and Flash Player applications that play back Flash Video content protected with Adobe’s Flash Access 2 DRM solution. When you’re in this situation it’s useful to know how to reset the voucher cached locally so that your application will pull fresh vouchers from the server while debugging.
Adobe AIR 1.5 applications started supporting DRM-protected video content with Adobe’s old FMRMS 1.5. Now, with Flash Player 10.1 and Flash Access 2, DRM-protected video content can be played back in both desktop AIR applications and Flash Player-based web applications. Although both application types are based on Flash Player and ActionScript, the methods of clearing the local voucher cache is different.
Here are the various methods you can use to reset your local vouchers.
Resetting the Local Voucher Cache in AIR applications (Using the ActionScript API):
The recommended way to reset your voucher cache in AIR applications is through the ActionScript API. The DRMManager class has a method called resetDRMVouchers(). You can call this method in your application during debugging and comment it out or remove it before the production release. It’s also something that you could implement in a settings manager or control panel within your application.
One thing to keep in mind with resetDRMVouchers() is that it seems to be per application, at least from my testing. I’ve submitted a forum post and commented the livedoc if you want to keep an eye on Adobe’s official response:
Resetting the Local Voucher Cache in AIR applications (Manually deleting ELS content):
Sometime you need to test server-side policy file updates and/or don’t have the luxury of modifying the code to add in a resetDRMVouchers() call. In this case you can clear out the Encrypted Local Store (ELS) directory for your application. This will remove the cached vouchers and force the app to request new one the next time you try to play the file.
For those that need some info on the Encrypted Local Store or where to find it on their system, here’s a good blog post that discusses ELS along with the location of the ELS directory on Windows and Mac OS: Link
Resetting Local Vouchers in Flash Player applications (Flash Player Settings Manager):
When working with Flash Access 2 and Flash Player versions 10.1 and above, the way to reset locally cached DRM vouchers is to go to the Flash Player Global Settings Manager.
Warning: Before running through this step please realize that unlike AIR reset processes which works per-application, resetting the local vouchers for Flash Player applications will reset ALL the vouchers for all the Flash Applications on your system.1. Go to the Flash Player Global Settings Manager. Link
2. In the Protected Content Playback Settings panel click Reset License Files (screenshot below)
3. In the Confirmation Dialog click to confirm that you want to reset ALL vouchers for all Flash Player applications. (screenshot below)
Resetting the Local Voucher Caches for Both AIR and Flash Player Globally:
At this time there is no way to clear DRM vouchers for all applications on your system at one time. You will have to use one of the four methods above on a case-by-case basis.
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