Kaleidescape is a California-based company that makes media servers for large and custom home theater systems. In the twelve years it's been around, it has become known for creating complicated, powerful systems that cost tens of thousands of dollars to store all of your movies and music into one place, retaining all of the quality and content you'd get from the physical discs. It's been a name well-known among home theater installers, but has only now gone into the consumer market with its first media server intended for purchase and setup without assistance. It's called the Kaleidescape Cinema One, and it's an impressive home theater component.
It's also $3,995 (direct), so it's not exactly accessible to the average consumer. That's as much as eight high-end Oppo BDP-103 Blu-ray players, or seven top-of-the-line TiVo DVRs. On one hand, it means you can rip your entire DVD and CD collection to a single box and have a curated, responsive library of movies and music at your fingertips that stores every scene, trailer, and extra from your discs. On the other hand, it's extremely expensive and requires an additional pricey piece of gear to offer the same convenient experience with your Blu-ray disc library.
Design
The Cinema One is a large brick, albeit a very stylish large brick. At 2.8 by 17 by 10 inches (HWD) and 10.2 pounds, it's comparable to the Oppo BDP-103, which is large for a Blu-ray player. Its front panel is a glossy white framed with gray metal that covers the player's body. The front holds a slot-loading Blu-ray drive and Eject, Power, and Source buttons, with a glowing Kaleidescape logo between them. Around back, there are minimal inputs and outputs: a single HDMI port, stereo RCA and coaxial audio outputs, a USB port, an Ethernet port, and a port for an infrared receiver if you want to put the box behind cabinet doors. It conspicuously lacks an optical audio output, but HDMI is more than functional enough, especially if your home theater uses a separate A/V receiver to handle audio (which, if you can spend $4,000 on a media server, is very likely).
The included remote looks like a slightly translucent satellite or cable box remote. It's simple to use, but you have plenty of other options for controlling the Cinema One. An iOS app lets you browse your library and manage playback from your iPhone or iPad. Ethernet support for home theater and automation systems let you integrate the Cinema One into your already present (and very expensive) Crestron or Control4 custom control system. Currently, there's no Android app. You can also get the $39 Child Remote, a simplified and colorful remote that restricts kids to browsing movies you add to the Cinema One's Child collection.
The interface is simple and easy to use, though it gets less functional the prettier it gets. Your media is separated into "Movies," which includes both films and television shows, and "Songs," which includes all of your albums. Each category can be viewed in an alphabetized list with cross-referencing options for directors, bands, and genres between each choice. You can also view each category in a grid that shows the cover art of your movies or albums. It looks much nicer, but it's much more difficult to navigate, with the order of choices seemingly random or near-random. The choices shuffle based on whatever the cursor is pointing at, arranging movies and television shows the Cinema One thinks are most like that choice around it. This means you can do some very nice zen-like browsing of your media library, but you can't flip through a grid of movie or album art arranged alphabetically.
Importing Movies
The library-building process is very easy to learn. Connect the Cinema One to the Internet using an Ethernet connection or the included Wi-Fi adapter. Insert a CD, DVD, or Blu-ray into the slot-loading drive. After a few seconds, the Cinema One will identify the disc and give you the option or playing or importing it. Importing copies all content from the disc to the hard drive, a process which takes about half an hour per DVD. Once the CD or DVD is imported, you can play it from the library menu even when the disc isn't in the drive. It becomes part of the collection stored on the Cinema One's hard drive.
Blu-ray is trickier. Because of copy protection, you need to have the Blu-ray disc in the optical drive to play a movie you copied to the hard drive. Kaleidescape offers a workaround for this with the DV700 Disc Vault, $5,495 accessory that can hold up to 320 Blu-ray discs. If the Cinema One detects the Disc Vault Connected and reads that the movie in your collection is in the disc vault, it plays the content of the disc from the copy it imported to the hard drive, making it load much faster. It's still inconvenient, and makes an already expensive and bulky home theater component much more expensive and bulky.
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