CEDIA 2010 Coverage

Kaleidescape must be doing well financially. They had a pretty good size booth and everyone there was upbeat and energetic. Take a look at their new Blu-ray players - three M300s ($2,495 each) and an M500 ($3,900). The M300 can only playback from a server, so for Blu-ray, it won’t fulfill its potential until the Vault is released. The M500 can playback from a disc or a server. Until the Vault is released, a Blu-ray disc must be present for playback, though it just checks that it is there and plays back from a server.

The servers themselves come in 1U ($9,995 fully loaded with 4 hard drives) and 3U ($24,995 fully loaded with 14 hard drives) versions. The 1U holds up to 900 DVDs or 150 Blu-rays; the 3U holds up to 3600 DVDs or 600 Blu-rays.

Or if you have a modest collection, you can start with the Mini System ($7,995) which holds 75 DVDs and add a server later.

So what about playing Blu-rays without having a disc in the player? Well for that you are going to need the Vault ($1,495). It is manufactured by Dacal, though Kaleidescape writes special firmware, and holds up to 100 Bl-ray discs. Kaleidecascape is working on a unit that will hold up to 300 Blu-ray discs which will cost “less than $6000″, which presumably means $5,995. Note that the only cabling is USB and power. The Vault does not stream movies; it just holds the discs and confirms to the server via USB that the movie is actually in the box.

By the way, I asked if they had had any communication from the HDCP licensing folks about their implementation of hard disk playback of Blu-rays with the physical discs stored in the Vault, and they said they had not.

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