Rich Fiscus
19 Jun 2008 0:15
Kaleidescape's home media servers have been a sore topic for the studios. They were the only company granted the license necessary to create a product capable of legally ripping CSS protected DVDs to store them for playback later. Unfortunately, despite the inclusion of managed copy features into the Blu-ray specs, they're not planning to have support for that format until next year. If you own one of these very expensive systems you'll have to settle for their new upscaling 1080p Player for now.
The Kaleidescape 1080p Player is a dual purpose device, capable of importing DVDs to Kaleidescape System servers and also playing them directly, making it a complete replacement for the older Movie Player 2 which upconverts to 1080i at lower quality. Another new feature includes the ability to go straight to the move on a DVD, skipping not just trailers and other content that plays before the menus, but even the menus themselves.
"These new Players have achieved our goal of producing beautiful high definition video from the DVDs that we've all been collecting for years," said Michael Malcolm, Kaleidescape founder, chairman and CEO. "The new 1080p Players leverage Kaleidescape's extensive Movie Guide database to make the viewing experience even more entertaining. Our patent-pending video bookmarking changes the way rental movies are enjoyed – no more annoying trailers, advertisements and DVD menus."
If you haven't heard of Kaleidescape you may be wondering how much the system costs. The best answer is probably "if you have to ask you can't afford it." The DVD player itself is slightly more than $4,000. That's not counting the price of an entry level Kaleidescape 1U server, which will set you back another $10,000.