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Blocked BD copy playback (Cinavia)

Hmm..

Initially, I thought that this could not be used on consumer-aimed BD, because the original and copy would be watermarked alike, and neither would play in a compliant player.

But I've just realised I'm wrong.

They could impliment a watermark code that means "Play only if content encrypted'.

Compliant players would see the watermark in the audio stream, and see it's on a non-encrypted backup, and refuse to play the backup copy.

That would be harder to get round, because it would involve decoding the audio stream, finding and defeating the watermark, and finally re-encoding the audio stream. Are there any available encoders for any of the HD audio formats which BD supports? Or perhaps it will need to be left as LPCM.

--
SC
 
I better talk to albain about getting support for this copy protection in ffdshow so my MKV's no longer play correctly. Oh, wait. :D
 
Won't this basically render AnyDVD HD useless to those of us who want to back up onto BD-R and play back in set top players?
 
I wouldn't jump to any conclusions just yet until the SlyGods have had a chance to mess with this. First, your player has to support it (and apparently all new players from this year forward do). And maybe the SlyGods can find a way to identify it and strip it from any streams that have it. You never know. However, yes, it's certainly a possibility that this will impact disc backup on future titles. We'll have to wait and see. For now, I wouldn't worry about it until we run head first into it. Remember all the panic before Avatar's BD+ release? :) I said back then and I say again now...don't worry until it's a problem.
 
Well I may be about to hit it as I have Losers on order
 
From what I've read so far it looks to be on screeners. I've not seen ANY report that it's on a commercially produced BD. So, we'll see when you get your copy just whether it has it or not. :D (Um, you already know this, but, I'd bust out one of those Panasonic BD-RE's if I were you. :D)
 
SamuriHL said:
From what I've read so far it looks to be on screeners. I've not seen ANY report that it's on a commercially produced BD. So, we'll see when you get your copy just whether it has it or not. :D (Um, you already know this, but, I'd bust out one of those Panasonic BD-RE's if I were you. :D)
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It is on Losers blu-ray. I got Message 3 on PS3.
 
Awesome. WOO HOO! Well, that'll be fun then. :D Looks like it's out next week in the US. Maybe I'll grab it just so I can see what devices I have like it or not.
 
florinsasu said:
It is on Losers blu-ray. I got Message 3 on PS3.
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I am curious to see the message would it be possible to post a screenshot of a message. Never mind this is the message which comes up.

"Playback stopped. The content being played is protected by Cinavia™ and is not authorized for playback on this device." Also there are many others kind of messages.
 
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florinsasu said:
US. pre-release

(i'll post an image later on. btw: message 3 comes after a while. message 1 comes rather quickly, in a minute or so)
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That is because Cinvia perform two checks every minute.
 
How, exactly step by step, was the disc backed up and burned for the PS3's consumption?
 
Stormcrow said:
That would be harder to get round, because it would involve decoding the audio stream, finding and defeating the watermark, and finally re-encoding the audio stream. Are there any available encoders for any of the HD audio formats which BD supports? Or perhaps it will need to be left as LPCM.
SC
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It's harder than that. I did some looking around to see what I could find on the technology in general. From a post I found on how the technology generally works, you couldn't even remove the watermark by reencoding, etc. So even stripping out the sound (using Stream Stripper, ClownBD, etc) would not remove the watermark:
Actually it's pretty impressive how it works. The watermark consists of slight variations in the audio frequencies, distributed throughout the audio track. The modified frequencies are audible, but blend into the overall sound and are virtually indistinguishable to the human ear. Tthe watermark is in the sound itself and not reliant upon digital encoding; it will exist even if you record from an analog source (external speaker, etc.). It will exist if you resample the audio, change the tempo, modify the duration, or other digital editing. Changing the audio in these ways will cause "static" in the watermark, but it is still recognizable and decipherable. Unless you really change the overall sound (like using low-quality resampling), the watermark wil exist. I've experimented with this and it's pretty neat - possibly useful for storing basic images and song information. I've defeated one scheme which uses mono WAV audio, and the technique might just defeat other schemes also.

For those interested, the watermark scheme in particular I want to know more about is from Traxsource.com which is an online music store. They have some great tracks and don't use conventional DRM.
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So it looks like the only way around this (besides detecting and removing the watermark) is for players to basically ignore the watermark. I don't hold out too much hope for TMT3 or PowerDVD in this case as they are commercial players. Looks like the stock for free software players just went up.
 
There are ways to neutralize it if you can determine the algorithm the players use to detect it. You don't need to fully remove it, exactly. You could, um, tweak it slightly so it's not recognized by the players. As long as your tweak doesn't end up leaving audible impurities you're good to go. The first trick is for there to be some way for a non-supported "device" (cough AnyDVD) to recognize it in the stream. Then it needs to figure out how to neutralize it. Let's see what the SlyGods do with one of these foolish discs.
 
Hint

PS3 won't detect Cinavia if media is playing faster than real time. However once it goes back to real time it will then detect Cinavia and respond to it. Minimum playback speed which need to be maintain is 1.5X in order to render Cinavia useless.

Assuming you have latest firmware, as of know version is 3.40
 
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SamuriHL said:
There are ways to neutralize it if you can determine the algorithm the players use to detect it. You don't need to fully remove it, exactly. You could, um, tweak it slightly so it's not recognized by the players. As long as your tweak doesn't end up leaving audible impurities you're good to go. The first trick is for there to be some way for a non-supported "device" (cough AnyDVD) to recognize it in the stream. Then it needs to figure out how to neutralize it. Let's see what the SlyGods do with one of these foolish discs.
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That's the issue though, the watermark itself actually adds impurities to the soundtrack, it's just that they are supposed to be "intergrated" into the sound so they are virtually imperceptible.
“Because the watermark is carried right in the essence of the A/V content, it is very important that the technology be designed in a way that it doesn’t degrade the picture or the sound,” said Winograd. “That’s where psychophysics comes in to it. There’s been a long body of research starting in the 50s and on through the 90s as to what your eyes and ears can actually discriminate. This research has been the foundation of all the advances in digital video and sound encoding and distribution. Psychophysics tells us which parts of the content you can change or distort without it being perceptible to the viewer.”
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I see being able to detect the watermark if you have the algorithm, but i'm not so sure how you would remove it or "tweak" it without possibly adding more impurities to the original sound. This is because the watermark is supposedly "fined tuned" to the sound that it's added to so changing it would make it more noticeable??

It seems the Bluray group is throwing everything but the kitchen sink at what they see as piracy. Anyway, this is all speculation until Sly gets a shot at the disk, but I must say that this may qualify as the kitchen sink. I can't see how blank disk manufacturers would support this as all this does is basically kill of a big part of thier business.
 
PrincipalityFusion said:
That's the issue though, the watermark itself actually adds impurities to the soundtrack, it's just that they are supposed to be "intergrated" into the sound so they are virtually imperceptible.

I see being able to detect the watermark if you have the algorithm, but i'm not so sure how you would remove it or "tweak" it without possibly adding more impurities to the original sound. This is because the watermark is supposedly "fined tuned" to the sound that it's added to so changing it would make it more noticeable??

It seems the Bluray group is throwing everything but the kitchen sink at what they see as piracy. Anyway, this is all speculation until Sly gets a shot at the disk, but I must say that this may qualify as the kitchen sink. I can't see how blank disk manufacturers would support this as all this does is basically kill of a big part of thier business.
Click to expand...

I'm not an audio engineer but for every signal that's embedded in an audio wave, there should be an opposite signal that cancels it. So if you can detect the stupid watermark crap, you could probably apply an algorithm that removes the embedded signal in a way that's also imperceptible. Sounds hard and most likely is, but, do you honestly think BD+ was easy? I mean, that stupid protection uses encryption keys that encrypt fix up tables that repair intentional damage to a stream. In realtime. So yes, this is a challenge, but, it's not insurmountable. It's an embedded signal that the player must somehow be able to recognize. So, if the player can find it, so can a reverse engineer. Then it's a matter of figuring out how to safely remove it. I'm wondering if they could use the same "fix up table" methodology that is used to repair BD+ protected titles to "repair" the "damage" to the watermarked stream. :D (I mean, create a fix up table that removes the watermark, not reuse an existing fix up table). Again, sounds "simple" when I say it, but, um....yeaaaaaaaaaa.
 
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