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NEWS: Premiere products end-of-sale approaching soon, Support not impacted except discontinued products

No one should have to worry about drives for a long time (but I understand the concern, and the suggestions).

Jim
 
How about a data migration service from Premiere to Encore?
 
How about a data migration service from Premiere to Encore?
I've wondered about this too. Would be great if it were possible, but I think there would be quite a few hurdles to overcome.

There's the whole licensing thing - would the studios K have agreements with be happy to allow their content accessed this way? They would surely have to keep the disc vaults alive to enable this, so that Blu-Ray ownership could be verified, and I'm not sure they plan to keep selling them.

And then even if our content could be migrated to Encore hard drives, how would our collections be backed up? With Premiere it's KRAID and with Encore your purchased content is available for re-download should there be a hardware failure. Some of us would require very large cloud storage to enable this. If every other hurdle could be overcome, perhaps uploading our collections to the cloud would be the biggest challenge!

Not a perfect solution, but at this stage and as a compromise I'd be pretty happy if they just kept the disc server option alive, so that our disc collections could be integrated with our store content and play directly from the vault. I completely understand that K don't want to direct any further resources on cataloging and bookmarking discs, but would be happy if they stopped this service and kept the functionality available with the movie guide as it is now so that it would work with our existing collections.

If I were a prospective customer with a large disc collection looking into K, I'd think this was a pretty compelling proposition to buy into the new world of digital downloads, without having to immediately say goodbye to my discs. No other system can offer anything like this. I really hope Kaleidescape don't abandon it altogether. Not just yet, anyway.
 
I've wondered about this too. Would be great if it were possible, but I think there would be quite a few hurdles to overcome.

There's the whole licensing thing - would the studios K have agreements with be happy to allow their content accessed this way? They would surely have to keep the disc vaults alive to enable this, so that Blu-Ray ownership could be verified, and I'm not sure they plan to keep selling them.

And then even if our content could be migrated to Encore hard drives, how would our collections be backed up? With Premiere it's KRAID and with Encore your purchased content is available for re-download should there be a hardware failure. Some of us would require very large cloud storage to enable this. If every other hurdle could be overcome, perhaps uploading our collections to the cloud would be the biggest challenge!

Not a perfect solution, but at this stage and as a compromise I'd be pretty happy if they just kept the disc server option alive, so that our disc collections could be integrated with our store content and play directly from the vault. I completely understand that K don't want to direct any further resources on cataloging and bookmarking discs, but would be happy if they stopped this service and kept the functionality available with the movie guide as it is now so that it would work with our existing collections.

If I were a prospective customer with a large disc collection looking into K, I'd think this was a pretty compelling proposition to buy into the new world of digital downloads, without having to immediately say goodbye to my discs. No other system can offer anything like this. I really hope Kaleidescape don't abandon it altogether. Not just yet, anyway.
Speaking of which, do Kaleidescape still sell the disc server as an add-on to Encore? If so, do we think they plan to continue selling/supporting them? And I read somewhere that Blu-rays are only playable via the Alto and not the Strato. Why is that?
 
Replication between Premiere and Encore will never happen, there is more than one reason for that, so that's not an option going forward. The M700 is the only Vault that is currently listed on the price sheet.

Jim
 
Linking this post from Mike at Kaleidescape here as it is relevant in this discussion too:


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.
 
I’d like to make a correction—currently both the M700 and the DV700 are still on the official Kaleidescape price list. I say this as a Kaleidescape dealer (for 15 years) who just looked at the price today. So if anyone wishes to purchase either one new with a full warranty and factory support the time to do it is now.

In speaking to the Kaleidescape factory yesterday, they said that anyone purchasing either the M700 or the DV700 now can have factory service and support for 5 years from date of purchase. You can talk to your local dealer about your system upgrade and he can assist you with how to properly configure your K system for either of those optical disk vaults.
 
AlanG is correct, my eyesight is failing me, the DV700 is still available, check with your dealer, or K directly if interested.

@AlanG, thanks for the correction!

Jim
 
Folks, my 3U and players for a really long time (I don't know, maybe since 2007 or so). I have a ton of family movies I shot, transferred to blu-ray and ripped on the server, so it's a wonderful thing to play that stuff for family and friends. Point is - I don't see a way to move off the Premiere without a quality of life hit. But drives and other components fail and the company is moving away from the platform - so, I get it.

Question: Is there a way for me to purchase additional support my equipment from Kaleidescape? What are the biggest drives supported on the 3U? Can I purchase those in order to prepare for drive failure? Will the system let me know if I've lost a drive?

I may be talking myself into the 4K equipment, but I would love, at a minimum, to run the systems side-by-side, so I don't lose the Premiere, but I get the new stuff too.
 
Hi Joe, your story is like many that own K, so you're not alone. I'll state the obvious here, if you want to maintain your Premiere equipment, and access to home videos stored on that equipment, you only have two choices:

1. Buy spare parts to help maintain the system. (not many available from K, so you may have to out-source from a 3rd party, i.e. power supply)
2. Upgrade your 3U to a 1U+ to gain an additional 5 years of support (standard 3 yr warranty and can add 2 additional years)

K will continue to offer the 6TB drives for the 3U so those should not be a problem going forward. The 6TB is the largest drive available for a 3U (or 1U). The 1U+ 30TB version uses 10TB drives. Yes, the system will continue to Alert you when a drive fails.

I like the 1U+ for a few reasons. First, you get the up to 5 years of additional support. Second, you reduce your exposure to possible drive failures from 14 drives (assuming full 3U) down to 4 drives, and as an aside, the 1U+ uses less electricity to operate than a 3U (more important for those that leave the 3U powered On 24/7).


Jim
 
Not sure this helps, but we store all of our home movies on our Mac. They then stream easily through our Apple TV. It even makes movies out of all of our pictures/videos for certain dates, years, people, etc. with background sound. Works pretty easy. I’m sure there are other choice. SJ
 
I’d recommend that in parallel to exploring options to maintain or upgrade your Kaleidescape system, that you locate those home movie Blu-rays If you still have them and rip them to a Mac, PC or NAS. As SJ says, they can then be easily streamed throughout your home a variety of ways. But the important thing is that you back them up either locally or to a cloud service. I have irreplaceable content like this stored on a NAS with RAID protection and then the NAS itself is backed up to external storage. I also have most of that content backed up to cloud.

Maintained properly, a system/process like this is as close as you can get to guaranteeing being able to enjoy those movies for a lifetime, or even your grandkids lifetime. With the 1U+ you’d only be buying 5-10 years more time, rather than a “forever” solution - which is what I think you need for irreplaceable content like home movies.
 
I'm working on something related to home movies, not sure it can be done, but I'm checking. I'll update later.


Jim
 
Does the 1U+ have the same download speed as a Terra Server or limited like the original 1U?
 
Does the 1U+ have the same download speed as a Terra Server or limited like the original 1U?

For me, it’s in between. Downloads on my 3U would run around 60-80Mbps while my 1U+ runs ~150Mbps. My Terra Server runs 500Mbps limited by my ISP.

John
 
My findings are similar to what John is seeing.

Jim
 
For me, it’s in between. Downloads on my 3U would run around 60-80Mbps while my 1U+ runs ~150Mbps. My Terra Server runs 500Mbps limited by my ISP.

John
Same here!

Kostas
 
Jim touches on something that I don’t think its often considered - I certainly didn’t consider it anyway - running costs! I’ve noticed a heck of a difference just replacing 2 Altos and 2 Stratos with my Terra as well as moving from a couple of 1U’s and 120’s to a single 1U+

RE ”home movies” - I’d not like the idea of moving stuff to NAS (I could and I’m fortunate to have all the kit and Plex pass etc already) but like Joe & many others, it was more about leveraging the K ecosystem and the “one stop to shop” for stuff. I might know to switch between systems for stuff, but I know the rest in the house don’t (or forget or can’t be bothered). But given it looks like we might have to, then having a method to extract them would be great, even if it wasn’t 1-1 bitrate. A bit (ha) like the Conductor software into iTunes.
 
IMO, home videos (depending on how much you have) would be better managed keeping them in a OneDrive or iCloud or Google Drive than trying to connect them to something Kaleidescape. I have all our family photos and videos in cloud storage, although I am closing in my current 1TB limit. Check out a Microsoft 365 subscription, for example.
 
Aye, all my photos stay on the NAS and iCloud. “Feature” length stuff though I’ve copied onto K too. The sad thing about digital stuff is that because you cannot physically see it, you (certianly others) won’t ”see it” and be drawn to it. Same as with books all going on kindle, no physical photo albums, etc. I know that’s going off topic but I think the usability aspect can’t be overlooked and is something that still needs to be “unlocked” across the board. ”We“ as the techies/nerds/geeks/enthusiasts that like or have had to learn an ecosystem, know how to use it and where stuff resides. Friends and family don’t, wouldn’t, can’t. Think that is something that modern tech does take away to a degree and definitely a big opportunity for someone to unlock... anyways...
 
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