[sleemo]

News is a bit old but it's starting to show up.

Haven’t heard about Cinavia? Chances are, you will soon if you download pirated movies and attempt to play them back on a Blu-ray player or through a PS3. Cinavia is a somewhat new DRM technology that uses "audio watermarking" embedded into the audio stream portion of a movie. In a nutshell, what it does is compare the source of the audio to the format in which a movie was released (ie theatrical or commercial disc), and if the watermarked audio source detects a difference, the movie will either be mute (but most likely not play at all). So far, there have been at least two popular movies found on peer-to-peer that contain Cinavia DRM: TS/CAM versions of The Wolfman and Shutter Island.

And from the Cinavia site:

Other releases (such as most Blu-ray Disc, DVD, and authorized downloads over the Internet) are meant for use on consumers’ in-home and mobile devices, but are not meant for copying by consumers, or are only permitted to be copied in limited ways (for example, to a limited number of computers, recordable discs, or devices).

 

[AmowAgou]

DRM is waste of time and money, there is always a way to beat it. Furthermore, external hard drives and media players are cheap and portable, why would people bother to burn downloaded copies of movies to discs and play them via regular DVD/Blu-ray players?

 

[MarcP]

For this system to work, it has to know what movie you're watching so it can compare. What if you just rename the file to something non obvious?

 

[rabbit]

> For this system to work, it has to know what movie you're watching so it can compare.

The way I think it works is that there's a signal in the audio saying "this audio is sourced from a Blu-ray Disc" (roll of film, or whatever), and if you're playing an MKV, then the audio will mute. It doesn't actually carry information about what movie it is.

For the Blu-ray example, maybe the DRM/watermark can be defeated if you made dummy files to recreate a typical Blu-ray disc, and include it with the MKV.

Note that the Blu-ray player has to support the DRM/watermarking in order for it to work .
"Since the Cinavia protection is limited to Blu-ray players only (and PS3s), the technology does not affect any playback methods that do not include Cinavia detectors."

 

[MarcP]

This DRM technology is said to also work on pirated videocam versions of theatrical releases.

So far, there have been at least two popular movies found on peer-to-peer that contain Cinavia DRM: TS/CAM versions of The Wolfman and Shutter Island.

This is not just about Bluray releases and the article does mention about comparing.

In a nutshell, what it does is compare the source of the audio to the format in which a movie was released (ie theatrical or commercial disc), and if the watermarked audio source detects a difference, the movie will either be mute (but most likely not play at all).

So in order to compare, it has to know somehow what it has to compare to.

 

[classicsat]

I think that the audio "coding" in additition to saying it has Cinravia, says what the source codeing is, be it commercial Blu-Ray, theatre, whatever.

The player also knows what sort of disc it is playing, by looking on hidden tracks and info headers.

Obviously, there is no way a theatrical orginal can be on a cosumer blu-ray disc (at least it is highly unlikely), nor a commercial Blu-Ray relase be on a burnt disc, which is easy to tell, and not hideable by burning software.