NEWS: New Kaleidescape "M-Class" players announced, with Blu-ray support

[JerryL]

I'm from the take as much footage as you can school which means I usually have a ton of footage to edit. I might shoot 1 hour for a 2 hour birthday party and then I go back and try to edit that down to 2-10 minutes. No one wants to rewatch the whole party. Editing that 1 hour requires me to watch most of that hour to get the nuggets and also make sure I dont have people saying anything problematic (or embarrassing!!).....

[Joe]

Me too, but I have never gotten around to editing the footage. I keep thinking that's something I'll do when I retire - whenever that is! It's still an awesme experience to be able to tee up any home video instantly on the k-scape. Continuing that into the blu-ray/HD world will be fantastic once it's available.

[JerryL]

Some of the new software out there has some auto editing in it that is surprisingly effective. Im sure they will find a way to get allow home movies. I agree its a great part of the system. What would be really nice- direct deposit of home movies in HD (or SD) straight to the hard drives. Im sure there will be concerns but Im also sure there is a way to deal with it.

[Joe]

Yes, direct deposit really would be nice. Having to do the intermediate step of creating blu-ray disks of home movies is a bit of a pain. In the past, my workstation and laptop have spent days pegged at 100% CPU utilization just rendering the HD content captured from my camera using Sony Vegas. After that, a couple of hours just to burn the blu-ray disk. Now, that's on relatively old iron (dual Xeon 3.6 GHz workstation, 2.8GHz dual core laptop), so I am hoping a tech refresh later this year will give me better resources to work with.

[Joe]

OK, I got my M500 yesterday. Very, very nice refinements to the user interface - really freshened things up.

The only thing I don't understand are the bluray import semantics. I imported an Avatar blu-ray disc. However, when I went back to play it, I wasn't offered a "Play Movie" option. Instead, I could only select "Play Disc", which behaved as if I had placed the disc in my PS-3. I had a menu to deal with, select "play", etc. I thought the experience would be the same as any other import (i.e. play movie, movie starts no menu, etc) as long as the disc was in the tray. Did I miss something?

[Mr.Poindexter]

If you are not offered "Play Movie" as an option, then they do not have the disc in their library. It is the same thing with DVDs. It would have to be sent in for bookmarking, which sucks on the BluRay titles because you cannot play the disc until you get the title back from them.

I finally went through my collection and dug out all the DVDs I could find that were not in their database and sent them in and found their backlog of entering titles into their system is a bit long. Perhaps they should open an express lane for BluRay titles due to the inability of playing the title when you don't have the physical disc in hand.

I also think it is odd that Avatar would be missing from their database. I had some fairly mainsteam BluRay titles missing as well, Bee Movie, Terminator 2, Hitch, and xXx (w/Vin Deisel). I wonder if there are some multiple pressings of some major titles that are causing issues for the bookmarking system. I know that the Baby Einstein discs had that problem - every so often they made a new pressing of them and they had to all be re-bookmarked each time. I recall somebody telling me when I sent mine in that it was the fourth time they bookmarked the entire series. Perhaps this happened with your Avatar disc.

[Joe]

Yeah, I thought it was odd that Avatar would not be in their database. The metadata is there - the cover art, description, etc, so I would think that would mean that the movie is in in the database.

[Mr.Poindexter]

No, it means that when the first person who loaded it didn't see the data, they put in the UPC code and Kaleidescape's system was able to find out which title that was and link it to the data they had for Avatar but it wouldn't have the same bookmark locations unless the disc was sent in.

[Joe]

OK, I will send it in. Come to think of it, I should send in all of my blu-rays now as I won't really be watching them much until the vault comes out. Too inconvenient as-is.

[cinelife]

With the latest release of KEAOS (4.0.2) you can now import "self-authored" BR content, and other BDMV content. Once imported, these can of course be played back without the need for the physical disc (as can any unencrypted BR disc).


Jim