This is what it will look like:Cinavia's anti-piracy technology has been a thorn in the side of many file-sharers,who are unable to pay pirated files on their DVD-players without being interrupted bya warning message. In a breakthrough development, software vendor DVD-Rangerhas cracked the protection, including for popular movies downloaded from piratesites. dvdrangerCinavia’s anti-piracy technology relies on a unique type ofwatermarking that allows it to remain present in pirated movies despite re-recording,transcoding, compression, or other type of transfer. This means that camcordings ofCinavia-protected first-run movies, Blu-ray and DVDrips can be easily detected.Support for the technology has been mandatory for all hardware and software Blu-ray players since 2012, which causes headaches for many pirates every day.Pirated movies protected by Cinavia work at first, but after a few minutes playback ishalted and a warning notice appears on the screen instead. “Audio outputstemporarily muted. Do not adjust the playback volume. The content being played isprotected by Cinavia™ and is not authorized for playback on this device,” one of thenotices reads. cinavia Cinavia has been hailed as an unbeatable anti-piracytechnology and up until today it was impossible to crack through a simple softwaresolution. However, after several years DVD-Ranger has now solved the puzzle. Thecompany informs TorrentFreak that their Cinavia removing solution is now able toremove the play restrictions from pirated downloads in various video formats,something that was previously impossible. “We have improved DVD-Ranger for usewith torrent files. Now DVD-Ranger CinEx HD can remove Cinavia from downloadedtorrent video files such as avi, mkv, mp4, mov and others,” DVD-Ranger’s IngoFörster explains. “The new module first scans the audio and then removes theCinavia protection on the first pass. The contained video and subtitles will be handledpass-through, meaning that only the selected audio track will be re-encoded,” headds. On their website the software specifically targets BitTorrent pirates, many ofwhom have run into Cinavia protection in recent years. With DVD-Ranger’s “CinEx HDAdvanced” software this is no longer a problem, although freedom doesn’t comecheap at $69.99 per license. cinavia-rangers Förster and his colleague at DVD-Ranger have been working in the DVD-copying business for over a decade. Forthem, it was mostly the challenge that made them decide to break the Cinaviatechnology. “Me and my partner are working both in science jobs and we were incontact with digital watermarks many years before Cinavia was born, so we knowmany things about digital watermarking. After we saw how many problems the majorplayers such as DVDFab and Slysoft had with Cinavia, we started our owndevelopment,” Förster says. Technically, Cinavia is not copy protection so theGerman based developer doesn’t believe they are breaking any laws. The files canbe copied with and without a watermark, and their software only removes these“play” restrictions. “In our country it is only forbidden to develop and sell softwarethat circumvents copy protection. The law doesn’t mention digital watermarks. So is itlegal? Definitely,” Förster notes. In any case, DVD-Ranger’s breakthrough is likely tocause concern at Verance, the company where Cinavia is developed. Perhaps it’sthe start of a new watermarking arms race?