Cinavia, Feb, 1, 2012 and forwards

[SamuriHL]

I agree, by the time I figured it out on my own time, some else would probably have been first with serious funding.

I do coding professionally but nobody is paying me to take up this hobby

I'm a software engineer myself. And I wouldn't even try it. Too much effort. You need a good team of expert reverse engineers who do that for a living.

 

[SamuriHL]

Actually, Cinavia is pervasive and can be used on any media. HDDVD was bound to loose because of the capacity. I wonder about which is better for longevity though.

Impossible. Why? Because HD DVD shipped as a finished standard. Blu-ray is a moving target and continually "evolves". Hence why the first BD players can't do BD Live, for example.

 

[SamuriHL]

Cool. I'm a software/hardware engineer but audio and video was never my speciality, but long a hobby. There is a lot I don't know about the a/v world.
But sound cancellation was one thing I worked on as a hobby long before it became a reality. Sound cancellation only became a practical commercial reality with smaller, cheaper, higher powered A/D converters and processors. That is the tech that will defeat cinavia eventually.

I'm not sure about that. The patents show that they thought about that kind of attack on Cinavia. In fact they thought about most "logical" attack vectors. And sadly they even have a process to update detection and/or add new signals if any attack vector is successful. This isn't some bit of "noise" they add to the audio. It's quite an effective, intelligent watermark.

 

[SamuriHL]

I thought that Cinavia could be picked up on any camcorder. I've also heard that PS3's will even detect Cinavia from a video that has been re-encoded to avi and played back through DLNA. It sounds like it could be added to any audio track as part of the content and not part of the actual media standards.

Yes, that's all true. What they do is at the analog level they *combine* the signal with the audio using a transformation process. Once the signal is combined with the actual audio (supposedly in an inaudible way but we all have our doubts about that), it can then survive any re-encoding/recording. Even a crappy microphone will pick it up because it's literally a part of the actual audio. Again, it's not some noise you can filter out. They're changing the properties of the audio in order to detect it. As I said...nasty.

Oh, how this relates to HD DVD and why that can't be done. That's because DETECTION wasn't part of the HD DVD standard. So therefore there's no way for them to add detection to the players.

 

[SamuriHL]

Agree completely. That's why it's so hard to defeat. It would take an intelligent program that would need to be updated regularly with new detection software as the players are updated. It would be a real rat race. But I never claimed it would be easy, just not impossible.

I don't believe it's impossible, either. Just difficult enough that some guy sitting at home isn't going to handle this one on their own. No offense meant. It's just that they spent a lot of money on this protection...and it's an evolution of a protection that already proved itself quite capable on the market. See DVD-Audio for what I mean. Any limitations they had with that have been fixed.

 

[SamuriHL]

Ok, now I understand that. But with EEPROM in the players, it's always possible they could have changed the standard in the future anyway.

Not to add Cinavia detection. It's believed that it can't even be added to the first generation of BD players. It requires a significant amount of processing power. They have to decode the audio and then run their detection algorithm. It's widely believed that the first gen of BD players don't have the power to do that. The HD DVD standard certainly didn't seem to allow for it. I guess we'll never know for sure, but, I know when we first started talking about BD+ James said that couldn't have been added into the HD DVD standard. It was a very simple standard...a true evolution to DVD.

 

[James]

Impossible. Why? Because HD DVD shipped as a finished standard. Blu-ray is a moving target and continually "evolves". Hence why the first BD players can't do BD Live, for example.

Or PIP. Or HD audio. I wonder if the first players can even play the most recent discs.

 

[SamuriHL]

Or PIP. Or HD audio. I wonder if the first players can even play the most recent discs.

As my dad would say (he has a first gen Sony BD player), not very well, no. I don't even think they update the firmware on it anymore. My poor dad...my mom won't let him get a new player. UGH! Stupid "evolving" format...

 

[James]

Oh, how this relates to HD DVD and why that can't be done. That's because DETECTION wasn't part of the HD DVD standard. So therefore there's no way for them to add detection to the players.

It would have been added to the AACS license for new (more powerful) HD DVD players as well. No difference to Blu-ray.

 

[SamuriHL]

Agree with that too. But don't be surprised if someone at home doesn't defeat it at least once. As for a sustainable marketable solution, that will take a networked organization, no doubt about that.
But you have to start somewhere. Engineers like us love a challenge

No argument there. Have at it if you wish!

 

[SamuriHL]

It would have been added to the AACS license for new (more powerful) HD DVD players as well. No difference to Blu-ray.

That's an interesting thought. I guess you have a point, though. The later players could have been forced into this nonsense by the AACSLA just like BD players are now. The threat of having their license pulled would be enough to make them do it. Yea, I guess I can believe that. Sadly.

 

[PrincipalityFusion]

It's the same principal as noise cancellation technology.

No, not really. From my understanding of what i've read, Cinavia is more akin to spread spectrum technology. And if you know anything about spread spectrum, it's biggest selling point is resistance to inteferrence. Cinavia is like this in the sense that it is spread throughout the soundtrack so that killing one part of it still allows a Cinavia enabled player to detect it. My guess is that you would basically have to noticeably mangle the sound in order to defeat it through audio signal hacking. Sorta like burning down your house to solve a termite problem. I would think more than just audiophiles would have an issue with that.

As far as hacking goes, i do agree that Cinavia will be defeated through the results of hacked firmware so I agree with you there. The issue there is always can the person doing the hacking keep up and what sort of protections will player manufacturers put in place to try to stop their players from running hacked firmware. The reasons for this are not all bad either. If i were a player manufacturer, I would want to try and avoid all the support calls I would no doubt get as customers running hacked firmware start having all sorts of issues.

It remains to be seen how hardware player users who backup thier media will handle Cinavia, but for the immediate future, the only real solution is to use a software player solution or a hardware player not infected with Cinavia.

 

[Pelvis Popcan]

One thought I had... does AACS licensing say anything about security for Cinavia detection in players? In other words... could a manufacturer (that doesn't like Cinavia) include Cinavia in a firmware update, but have it in a very obvious place that would make it easy to spot and examine, or make it easy to remove via firmware hacking?

 

[Hawk]

No, There are guidelines which need to be followed to implement Cinavia. How manufacturer work with guideline is up to them.

For example Cinavia require it's components to be well protected. How manufacturer do it is up to them. If they don't AACS can revoke there player.

 

[sierra117]

sorry i didn't read thru the entirety of this thread, has it been determined yet what kind of audio watermarks are used ? are the audio markers audible to the human ear ?

i wonder if cinavia has been hacked yet ... since it's been introduced into a bunch of hardware already so i would think hackers are already working on it ....

another thing that concerns me here is whether this protection scheme will make it's way into every DLNA device sold .... i have an NAS that hosts media via DLNA, players and TVs as well can have DLNA support. so in the future as this becomes wide spread throughout devices even if you had a PC connected directly to your TV, cinavia may kick in on the TV .... that's just wrong.

who the hell are the studios to tell me what i can and cannot do with my blu-rays ?

 

[Frank]

Read about it ...

sorry i didn't read thru the entirety of this thread, has it been determined yet what kind of audio watermarks are used ? are the audio markers audible to the human ear ?

i wonder if cinavia has been hacked yet ... since it's been introduced into a bunch of hardware already so i would think hackers are already working on it ....

All the info is here for you if you want:

http://forum.slysoft.com/showthread.php?t=48789

and no, it has not been solved yet.

 

[Peer]

since it's been introduced into a bunch of hardware already so i would think hackers are already working on it ....

It's a rather small percentage of discs and hardware that so far have introduced Cinavia. You need a combination of both to be really bothered by it.

Presently it would mean a major effort to take care of a minor annoyance, so no one is tackling the problem with too much enthusiasm.
This will certainly change, as soon as Cinavia gets more attention.

 

[Ch3vr0n]

your reponses begs for the following one. Is slysoft CURRENTLY busy tackling the cinavia problem?

 

[sierra117]

would be nice if slysoft would introduce a new decrypter to address cinavia protection ... i'm already set and comfortable with ripbot264

 

[SamuriHL]

your reponses begs for the following one. Is slysoft CURRENTLY busy tackling the cinavia problem?

If I had to guess, I would say the focus is CURRENTLY on getting CloneBD finished and released. But that's just a guess.