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Moving Disc Vault from Premier server to Encore system

josh

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I'm a bit confused about the use of a DV700 in a Premier system vs. a DV700 used as a Disc Vault in an Encore system.

I have a "hybrid" system (co-star) consisting of a 3U server, DV700 and 4 Premier players; and then two Stratos and a Terra server over on the Encore side.
On the Premier server, I have 120 BluRays in the DV700, and of course they've been imported to my 3U system, along with about 2000 DVDs.

If I want to move as much of my movie content as possible from the Premier server to the Encore line, is this just a simple matter of unpairing the DV700 from the 3U system and then pairing it to the Encore system, whereby it would (?) catalog those Blu Rays and make them available for playback on the Stratos natively (rather than playing back the imported bitstream to the co-star'ed premier players)? Presumably then I could delete the stored blu-ray imports from the 3U server?

Obviously they'd now be playing back to my stratos from the disc rather than from hard drives, but I really don't care about a delay in starting up and will likely never need a blu-ray to be playing to multiple zones at once.

Is this a correct description of how to move a lot of Blu-ray content from Premier to Encore?
 
Strato cannot play discs natively from a vault. You would need an Alto to do this. Which you could then Costar with the Strato to have a unified content library and playback experience on-screen.
 
Wait... wasn't there a project years ago at Kaleidescape (referred to as KOS 7.3) that promised that Encore systems WOULD be able to play back content from DV700's? There are posts here on the forum (here's one) that implied that if Kaleidescape resumed operations after the 2016 shut-down and layoffs (which they ultimately did) then this would get back on track and be offered "some day"? Maybe @MikeKobb or @J.Green can let us know if that feature got permanently killed or might still get delivered. It's more important than ever now that Premier sales are ending and eventually support will end for these systems as well.
 
It wasn't able to be completed back then and was never enabled. At this point, there's no likelihood to see it happen. Strato playback from a vault, that is. The best option is set up an Alto/Vault/Costar/Strato system.
 
Deleted - realized you were only asking about Blu Rays as your Strato can play back DVDs from the vault.
 
The Strato should be able to playback DVD's in a Vault, but not BR.

Jim
 
The Strato should be able to playback DVD's in a Vault, but not BR.

Jim
Is in the inability to playback Blu-Rays from the Strato for licensing or technical reasons? Strange if it’s for technical reasons when it can play DVDs ok.

And in terms of an Alto and CoStar being the work around, isn’t the Alto discontinued?
 
It is my understanding that it was a technical issue they were not able to overcome (or didn’t want to continue dumping resources into it). I believe it had to do with the chip in the Strato or something like that. The Alto works fine playing blurays from a Disc Sever. SJ
 
I think that's correct. It should be remembered that the Encore line wasn't designed to include Vault playback, this function was added later through the Alto only. The Alto played both DVD and BR discs stored in the Vault. They never intended for the Strato to do that as well, but later were able to add that for DVD playback. To my knowledge, that is still the case.

Jim
 
Howdy folks. Just confirming that Strato does not play Blu-ray from a Disc Vault, and this functionality will not be added in the future. It's a bit of a complex story, but suffice it to say that adding Blu-ray playback support is a titanic engineering project, the scale and complexity of which really can't be overstated. We did it for the M-Class players, and are one of a tiny handful of companies other than the originators of the format to do so.

Strato, however, uses a completely different architecture with a different chipset. It's a large project to bring the stack to a new chip, and besides our own engineering effort, it also requires support from both the chip manufacturer and the third parties that provide supporting "middleware" software. This support is not forthcoming.

Taking a step back and looking at this from a larger perspective, the Disc Vaults will be among the products that are discontinued with the end-of-sale of Premiere systems. This is driven in large part by the end of life of the optical drives that the vault uses. As the sun continues to set on optical discs, manufacturers of these drives are winding down that business. We made a last buy purchase of drives to support the remaining production of the vaults, and to give us an inventory of service parts, but continued manufacture is not feasible.

So, there's really no practical avenue to add Blu-ray support to Strato.
 
Howdy folks. Just confirming that Strato does not play Blu-ray from a Disc Vault, and this functionality will not be added in the future. It's a bit of a complex story, but suffice it to say that adding Blu-ray playback support is a titanic engineering project, the scale and complexity of which really can't be overstated. We did it for the M-Class players, and are one of a tiny handful of companies other than the originators of the format to do so.

Strato, however, uses a completely different architecture with a different chipset. It's a large project to bring the stack to a new chip, and besides our own engineering effort, it also requires support from both the chip manufacturer and the third parties that provide supporting "middleware" software. This support is not forthcoming.

Taking a step back and looking at this from a larger perspective, the Disc Vaults will be among the products that are discontinued with the end-of-sale of Premiere systems. This is driven in large part by the end of life of the optical drives that the vault uses. As the sun continues to set on optical discs, manufacturers of these drives are winding down that business. We made a last buy purchase of drives to support the remaining production of the vaults, and to give us an inventory of service parts, but continued manufacture is not feasible.

So, there's really no practical avenue to add Blu-ray support to Strato.
Thanks for the insiders view Mike. A real pity that there’s no way for the Strato to support Blu-ray, but as a software developer myself, I completely understand that sometimes what seems from the outside like a straightforward feature to add, can actually be impossible to implement for arcane reasons.

As an owner/maintainer of an M700, I’m interested in what you say about the optical drive. I had my vault open for cleaning a couple of weeks ago and the drive looked like a standard off the shelf one (Sony Optiarc I think). Is there anything special about this drive that would preclude it being replaced by a similar drive?
 
I don't recall whether we got custom firmware on these drives (we have done that with earlier products), but even assuming they're bone stock, the issue as I understand it is that these drives were basically made for laptop computers that had slot-loading optical drives, and as optical drives disappeared from the laptops, they just quit making the drives, and we could not locate suitable replacements (proper form factor, reliable for disc reading/importing, etc.)
 
I don't recall whether we got custom firmware on these drives (we have done that with earlier products), but even assuming they're bone stock, the issue as I understand it is that these drives were basically made for laptop computers that had slot-loading optical drives, and as optical drives disappeared from the laptops, they just quit making the drives, and we could not locate suitable replacements (proper form factor, reliable for disc reading/importing, etc.)
Ok, makes sense. Thanks (y)
 
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