Clever anti-piracy tech Cinavia finally gets beaten

Scorpus

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Cinavia is one of the most interesting anti-piracy technologies going around. Designed to hamper and prevent the copying and sharing of films, Cinavia watermarks the audio stream in such a way that survives transcoding, compression, recording and many modifications. The watermark is detected by the playback device, and if it doesn't match the accompanying security key, playback is stopped.

The clever form of piracy prevention, which became mandatory for all Blu-ray players in 2012, has proven particularly difficult to crack. Early attempts at circumventing Cinavia involved exploiting bugs in Blu-ray players, while recent attempts have managed to detect the watermarked parts of the audio before removing and post-processing them.

These workarounds haven't exactly been perfect, as removing the watermark through traditional means causes a reduction in audio quality. That is, until now, with the DVD-Ranger team recently coming up with a way to remove the Cinavia signal in a way users won't notice.

DVD-Ranger's paid tool, CinEx HD Advanced, will take a film and remove Cinavia from the audio stream without altering the video or subtitle data. While the team claims their tool is perfectly legal (at least in Germany, where the team originates from) and will help users backup their Blu-ray collections, it presents a significant piracy risk.

Now that Cinavia has been cracked, it will be easy for pirates to burn their illegally downloaded movies onto disc without the disc players kicking up a fuss during playback. Cinavia has never stopped playback through other means, but the news certainly won't make the movie industry, or Cinavia developers Verance, very happy at all.

The question now becomes whether Cinavia will evolve to stop pirates, or whether a whole new form of anti-piracy software will be developed, but one thing's for certain: the battle to produce the best DRM certainly isn't over.

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Cinavia detection is done on Blu-Ray drives right? Who would rip a blu-ray movie and play it through a blu-ray drive? I would just keep it on the hard drive and play it through that.
 
Cinavia detection is done on Blu-Ray drives right? Who would rip a blu-ray movie and play it through a blu-ray drive? I would just keep it on the hard drive and play it through that.

Cinavia prevents playback by embedding a signal that will only allow playback by devices that have the ability to decode that signal. Hence the reason ripping and playback of a Cinavia encrypted disc has been so hard to accomplish. Typically the disc is played using a Blu-Ray drive which has the decoding hardware/software. When you rip a disc you're bypassing the drive to play the file back and thus you end up with no sound because the drive isn't decoding the signal.
 
Cinavia detection is done on Blu-Ray drives right? Who would rip a blu-ray movie and play it through a blu-ray drive? I would just keep it on the hard drive and play it through that.

Maybe because you are burning a movie for a friend or family member that doesnt have a PC connected to their TV? Try thinking..
 
AnyDVD-HD from SlySoft already prevents most software players from recognizing the Cinavia watermark on cloned Blu-Ray copies, thus negating the dubious "protection."
 
Cinavia detection is done on Blu-Ray drives right? Who would rip a blu-ray movie and play it through a blu-ray drive? I would just keep it on the hard drive and play it through that.

Maybe because you are burning a movie for a friend or family member that doesnt have a PC connected to their TV? Try thinking..

Lol thanks. You beat me to it. People rip Blu-ray movies and upload them or torrent them. The people who download them, sometimes want to convert from MKV to MP4, then burn to dual layer DVD. Then put that DVD into a PS3. If the movie was watermarked, then after 15-20 minutes of viewing, the PS3 would detect cinavia and mute the audio permanently.

I circumvent this by disconnecting my PS3 from the network. It prevents the PS3 from doing the necessary online check to match the movie to Cinavia. Problem solved, although quite annoying.

Also, I can copy the movie directly to my PS3 using PS3 Media Server, but in order to watch it, I must disconnect the PS3 from the net. No point taking the chance because once it's detected, the file is blacklisted forever.

If that happens, you must mux the video again but with a different filename.
 
So I can now rip my Blu-rays to my server? Finally! Now I can play my movies through my AppleTV's throughout my house. Glad this has finally been cracked...
 
I played DVD and BR rips through Plex in my PS3, Cinavia activated and boom! audio off.

I think the price is too high for such a small movie catalog.

Or you can just stream your movies with Plex through Chromecast without Cinavia problems ;)
 
"Now that Cinavia has been cracked, it will be easy for pirates to burn their illegally downloaded movies onto disc without the disc players kicking up a fuss during playback"

Using a blu-ray player, how quaint...
 
I'd just use a flash drive. But I bet this software was quite annoying for the sleezy lookin guy in front of the Mexican grocery store selling bootleg dvds.
 
Follow the music model, that is no DRM and make things a reasonable cost. For music $0.99 was the sweet spot. Find out what that is for movies and you'll still make money.
 
Could not agree more, the right price + quality product = happy customers buying your product
 
Hi Guys
I tried to copy a cinavia protected BluRay using DVD Ranger but it failed.The movie was released in 2013.
Next level I tried it with AnyDVD HD and it successfully copied the Dual layer 43.3GB to my Hard disk, beaten Cinavia.There is no mute no watermark it plays perfectly.
 
Cinavia detection is done on Blu-Ray drives right? Who would rip a blu-ray movie and play it through a blu-ray drive? I would just keep it on the hard drive and play it through that.
Because there are a lot of crooks out there who are trying to sell this as a dvd to people who are playing them on their PS3
 
"Now that Cinavia has been cracked, it will be easy for pirates to burn their illegally downloaded movies onto disc without the disc players kicking up a fuss during playback"

Using a blu-ray player, how quaint...
Not as easy as you might think. You need the program and then you need to download the database and then it will work for 139 movies only, at this point. I'm not sure, but I think what it does is inserts the trigger to those movies on the database to keep them playing. That's just a guess on my part but I was just reading the list on the database. And yeah, using a blu-ray player is little old school for some of us. My sister might upgrade to one soon though..LOL.
 
Cinavia detection is done on Blu-Ray drives right? Who would rip a blu-ray movie and play it through a blu-ray drive? I would just keep it on the hard drive and play it through that.
It's in the audio track from the studio and it's there even in the theater version so when people try to copy the movie at the theater they still get the protection. So it's not on the dvd or the blu ray it is in the original audio so format makes no difference. It's Sony and they have some very clever people.
Even whoever hacked in to their computers and stole copies of the Sony movies not yet released are getting movies with the protection encoded in them.
 
Has anyone tried to encode a movie with cinavia to .mkv or .mp4 and make the file read-only? Was just thinking out of curiousity if the file is actually pulling a ET phone home scenario then you could use a clever firewall or make the file read-only which will still allow it to be read when streamed over the network, yet no changes could be made to the actual cinavia protected media making it render unusable.
 
Cinavia protection doesn't modify the file when it's triggered. Even bootleg DVDs can be blacklisted, the player won't burn anything to the disc, but once it's checked the disc against the internet those check results get stored in the player.
 
Using a flash drive doesn't get around Cinavia, at least on a PS3. The sound still kicks out and the warning appears after about a half hour of playback on any given day.
 
Follow the music model, that is no DRM and make things a reasonable cost. For music $0.99 was the sweet spot. Find out what that is for movies and you'll still make money.
Wrong. Scumbags will still rip the movie and make it free on the net. Just like music.
 
Wow didn't know that, I just kept changing the date and time on my PS3 constantly....
I will try the network thing...
 
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