Verance, the developer of the watermark based copy protection Cinavia, announced availability of Cinavia for devices like televisions, set-top boxes, tablets and mobile phones. So far Cinavia could only be found on devices and software supporting Blu-ray movie playback. Cinavia became mandatory on Blu-ray hardware and software in 2012 and can be found in all new Blu-ray players including the popular Playstation 3 console.
Also next generation consoles like the Xbox One and Playstation 4 will not allow unauthorized playback of Cinavia protected movies.
The goal of Cinavia is to stop movie piracy by limiting the viewing of pre-release, theatrical, and home entertainment movie releases which have been pirated via unauthorized physical media replication, cyber locker, peer-to-peer file sharing, or streaming media services. Using an inaudible audio watermark embedded in a movie, Cinavia enables hardware and software to distinguish between legitimate and unauthorized copies of the content.
When playback or recording of an unauthorized copy of a protected movie, the Cinavia detector identifies the unauthorized use and blocks recording or playback. The latter means it usually mutes the audio after 20 minutes of playback. New versions of the protection will also provide a link to legally purchase the content online.
The result of Cinavia in more consumer electronics means that users will likely be restricted on what devices to watch their movies. Ripping a movie and encode it to watch on e.g. a tablet will likely become an issue and the same goes for streaming movies from a NAS to a TV.
Cinavia has been pretty successful. Software like AnyDVD, DVDFab and DVD-Ranger provide ways to get around Cinavia, all of them have drawbacks. There's currently an user on our forum claiming he has a method to remove the protection but so far we haven't seen proof.
