A Cinema One will set you back about $3,995.Įxpense is relative, but that's still a heart-stopping chunk of change. The system still isn't anywhere near approaching "cheap," but it is significantly less expensive than previous Kaleidescape offerings. The Cinema One is Kaleidescape's attempt at moving a bit down the market. They're great for an upmarket customer who wants to wire every room in his or her vacation home up for movie watching, but it's not a great option for the more middle-class among us. The company's traditional products, as mentioned, are expensive-like, $10,000-type expensive. Kaleidescape's systems automate a significant chunk of the HTPC experience, wrapping the movie ripping and storage aspect in a single attractive package that looks and functions more like an appliance than an HTPC. You also need to acquire a working knowledge of disc ripping and encoding, a task that isn't terribly difficult but isn't terribly easy either. Doing this will get you a system that does most of the things Kaleidescape's boxes do, but the DIY route comes with the added hassle of installing and maintaining your own software. This usually takes the form of a home theater PC running XBMC or one of its variants, with video and music stored either on internal storage or connected to a NAS over Ethernet. These are typically enormous devices that cost many thousands of dollars, and the boxes are more likely to be installed by a home theater contractor than by a normal consumer.Īny self-respecting home theater geek these days likely already has a setup designed to do something similar. The thing that sticks out about Kaleidescape is that its home theater boxes aren't small. (The company has since appealed the ruling.) Kaleidescape makes home theater machines-devices that can keep all of your DVD and Blu-ray movies in a single location and play them without the hassle of digging through DVD cases to find the right disc. Ars has covered Kaleidescape many times over the past several years, most recently in March when the company was handed a defeat in its long-running court battle against the DVD Copy Control Association (CCA).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |