Cinavia Blu-ray copy protection is broken

Several sources confirm to us that the current Cinavia Blu-ray copy protection is broken. The breakthrough came with the recent appearance of user Cienoway who has been working with our resident Cinavia chaser Macrovision3500 on developing a method to eliminate Cinavia detection by modifying the audio track of a movie.

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The method has been verified to disable Cinavia by several forum members, including the developer of DVD Ranger. The initial skepticism has now changed to respect and encouragement to further develop the method.

In its current state the method creates audio files with decent audio quality but Cienoway estimates this can be improved as he writes, "The 30 minutes audio clip that I posted to PutLocker and shared with MacroVision et al, with decent audio quality as it is, still contains a little bit random and hardly noticeable static noise. I suspected it was not cause by my method, but mere a bug in my computer code." And he aims to fix it as he goes on to write, "it is indeed confirmed to be a simple bug. After I fixing[sic] it, the audio quality is crystal clear, with no audible static or artifact."

So far no actual software has been released to the public. Cienoway has not revealed whether he wants to release his source code or that he will work with commercial parties in 'safe-harbours' like Antiqua (Slysoft) or China (DVDFab) to implement it in their software.  But we expect an end user solution should not be far away.

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And if Cienoway is right, it's the end of audio watermarking technology as he writes, "The break is so easy and simple. It breaks Cinavia fundamentally. The watermark science itself is broken, not the secret behind implementation. In another word, it is broken for good. There is NO feasible way of repairing the technology and make it work again".

The method remains a secret so far, the only thing we know that it randomly changes the speed of audio. Only the future can tell if this will be the end of Cinavia and the annoyances of users.

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The Cinavia copy protection is embedded in the audiotrack of a Cinavia protected movie  Hardware and software players contain a Cinavia watermark detector  which decides if the movie is legitimate or not. While Verance, the company developing it, claims it doesn’t affect the quality of the audio, others disagree.

The degradation of the audio  is a reason to try to find a method to remove the signal from audio tracks. Another reason is that Cinavia prevents  playback of Blu-ray backups.The protection will detect playback of the backup and will mute the audio after 20 minutes while showing a Cinavia warning prompting the user to get a legal copy of the movie.

Also pirates start to encounter Cinavia more and more as it’s also designed to stop illegal movie sharing. The Cinavia detector can also be found in the next generation consoles, the Xbox One and the Playstation 4.

Read more on Cinavia in our in depth article: Ultimate Cinavia Guide: the protection that refuses to be silenced, more information in this forum thread.

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