Hacking Cinea protection for more DVD screeners
Those of you who actually read scene NFOs could notice a strange thing in last few days. Many groups asked in their NFO for help with something called Cinea protection. PUKKA is probably the most popular of such groups and their NFOs still include a short paragraph. What’s it all about? One of our readers sent us some brief information about this protection, and it could be interesting for all of you.
To combat piracy, Cinea developed its innovative solution, which provides copy protection and piracy tracking for DVDs. Cinea’s solution includes the S-VIEW DVD player and encryption technology to safeguard content. The S-VIEW DVD player offers the highest-quality picture and sound. It also plays standard DVDs. In collaboration with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, Cinea has distributed the SV300 model of its S-VIEW DVD player to nearly 12,000 of the collective voting members. Recipients of the Cinea S-VIEW players simply need to install the player as part of their home entertainment system, as they would install a regular DVD player, and make a phone call or go online to register with Cinea.
Now the interesting part: Cinea encrypts each disc with a code unique to each member. The Cinea disc delivered to each member will play only on the Cinea S-VIEW DVD player registered by that member. A Cinea encrypted disc cannot be viewed on any other DVD player or computer. So you basically need to have a registered machine to play those review DVD copies, which are sent out to many film critics. You can’t play the disc on any other DVD player, so it’s impossible for a “scene-friendly” critic to share the disc with some release group, which would rip it and spread all over the internet.
So it’s quite obvious why many scene groups look for a help with cracking Cinea. Bypassing those security measures would lead to increased amount of DVD screeners, which often appear months before the final DVD and offer amazing image and audio quality. The good thing is that this protection is already slowly dying, because major companies like Disney who stood behind it refused to sponsor the creation of all discs and DVD players which were distributed for free, but it’s still used. So if you know any way of helping the whole scene would appreciate it. Anyway, it’s only a matter of time as with every protection…
If I would have access to dvdscreeners that is. 
