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Suggest me a system

Since you ultimately want a Premiere system, I would start looking for a 3U server and a DV700/M700. For the server, look for one with recent hard drives. If it comes down to one with older drives, look for one with the fewest number of (hopefully small) drives. In that situation, your strategy will be to swap out the oldest & smallest drives first (using the force fail method) when you purchase new drives.
So Strato + DV700 won’t let me upgrade my discs to digital? I want to see what I can convert to digital before I determine the hdd size I need.
 
I don't know the answer to the question of whether Strato + DV700 will catalog for D2D. But given the volume of discs you are wanting to catalog, a vault is going to be the most efficient vehicle to accomplish this task. Cataloging with an Alto, C1 2nd gen, or M500 + Premiere server is a slow process of loading a disc, waiting for it to be recognized and choosing the catalog option on screen. Doing that for hundreds of discs would not be fun.
 
You should be able to catalogue all of your DVDs and Blurays with a Strato and DV700, but only play DVDs. You would need an Alto to play Blurays and costar to integrate if desired... SJ
 
If all it's doing is cataloging, you could get the D2D offers, but where would the system tell you how much space is needed to actually store them in a premiere system? I know the store can tell you the number of "movies" that cannot be converted, but do you plan to just multiply by an average size (say 50GB) to decide how much space is needed?
 
If all it's doing is cataloging, you could get the D2D offers, but where would the system tell you how much space is needed to actually store them in a premiere system? I know the store can tell you the number of "movies" that cannot be converted, but do you plan to just multiply by an average size (say 50GB) to decide how much space is needed?
The system won’t tell me. I hear some d2d is a few bucks and some can be as high as a few bucks short of full retail. I won’t know until the system offers me the upgrade (or it won’t offer the upgrade for some titles). I will convert the ones that makes sense to me. Whatever is remaining will be the number of discs that will reside in the premier minus the ones I want to catalog only. So the question is do I want 2,4 or 6 dv700s and enough hdd to keep them all.
 
I know my Strato won’t play Blu-rays from a DV700/M700 but would it allow me to convert discs to digital?
Yes. With a disc vault linked to your Strato, you can "catalog" Blu-ray discs which qualifies you for the disc-to-digital offers. However, as you stated, none of the Blu-ray discs can be played on your Strato (nor will they appear in your on-screen collection).
 
This is great news! I will be looking for a dv700 next. Once I catalog a title, do I need the disc in the machine to d2d?
 
I bought a DV700 for my Strato but none of the discs I tried offered me disc to digital. Am I doing this wrong? Since Strato can't play Blu-rays, the discs only show on the web browser in the disc changer menu. Do I need them show up on the TV display in order to D2D?
 
You just need them to be registered in your account meaning you will see them listed in the browser interface and You should also see them in the K Store. Try searching for a title or two and look for the ownership badge. It will appear even on discs that may not have a D2D offer.

Andy


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
I found it. As you said, you need to catalog the titles in the disc changer. they don't show up on Strato because it can't play Blu-ray. So it needs to be on the web browser. Once catalog, use the web store , not the phone app, and go to manage -> disc to digital (or digital offers). Thank you
 
Just want to say I'm impressed @Substance. You went from a complete Kaleidescape newbie to a very advanced user with a well-designed path to upgrading your equipment to get what you want in the right order. Glad this community of users, dealers, and Kaleidescape technical personnel have been so helpful to you!

(Oh, and thanks for joining the forum as a Patron supporter!)
 
Just want to say I'm impressed @Substance. You went from a complete Kaleidescape newbie to a very advanced user with a well-designed path to upgrading your equipment to get what you want in the right order. Glad this community of users, dealers, and Kaleidescape technical personnel have been so helpful to you!

(Oh, and thanks for joining the forum as a Patron supporter!)
Thank you Josh for the kind words.

I made one incorrect assumption when designing my future system. Since I am having Vaults in my system, cataloging without importing isn’t possible with the M500 player. On a Premiere system, the M500 gives you the option to catalog or import when inserted a disc. If there is a DV700 in the system, the catalog only option isn’t available anymore. Just a little update here for anyone who comes to this topic later with a similar intend to mine.
 
Thank you Josh for the kind words.

I made one incorrect assumption when designing my future system. Since I am having Vaults in my system, cataloging without importing isn’t possible with the M500 player. On a Premiere system, the M500 gives you the option to catalog or import when inserted a disc. If there is a DV700 in the system, the catalog only option isn’t available anymore. Just a little update here for anyone who comes to this topic later with a similar intend to mine.

Thank you for the clarification on the M500. It seems In this case, someone who was using an m500 as a stand-alone blu-ray player would not automatically have the benefit of a catalogued title without a specific action to import/catalog.
 
My intend was to keep the Criterion Collection discs (I have the entire catalog of over 700 films) in their cases and catalog them to Kaleidescape without importing. This way I was hoping to browse the collection on the OSD while not needing any additional Vaults or server space. Because I already have DV700s in my system, M500 would import the discs to the server before playing them. I guess I can still keep them in their cases and not add additional DV700s to house those discs but I do need the storage space available.
 
I thought I would check in and update my progress since I started this thread in October 2020. It took me a few weeks to figure out the system(s) I need to achieve what I wanted to do with my large media collection. Many questions and considerations later, my journey began with my first purchase which was a used 2U Strato with 6TB storage. I will be honest, I was hesitant at first. There are a number of disadvantages with a closed system like Kaleidescape such as limited storage, expensive storage expansion options and limited titles on the store. Kaleidescape offers convenience of playing your movies like no other but is this enough to ignore the disadvantages? This Strato was going to be my opportunity to test this.

After only a few weeks of owning my Strato, I have realized I watched more movies than in the past. Furthermore, I often found my self going to specific scenes in certain movies which I have never done before. This could be explained only by the ease of access to your movie library by the Kaleidescape system. In additions, I found several movies on the store that didn’t have disc equivalent with the same technical merits. These advantages were enough reasons for me to move forward with my journey.

Now I needed to expand this experience by incorporating my existing physical media library. I knew I could convert some of my discs to digital. I needed a disc transport for this however I also had a ton of titles not available in the digital store. I started building a Premiere system around a 3U server and several Vaults. With this system I could import my DVDs and Blu-ray discs to the 3U server. I have listed my current system and my upgrade path for the near future below.

Current System:

Strato-6TB (2U)
M700
*CoStar on my Lumagen Radiance Pro 5348

Premiere 3U server (3x 6TB drives)
DV700
DV700
DV700

Planned Future Upgrades:
4x6TB drives next week (and add 3-4x 6TB drives every month until max out)
Terra 48TB (This will probably take me a few months)

I would like to thank everyone for their help and special thanks to Jim at Cinelife for helping me with most of these components and answering all my questions. Some of the Premiere components I listed above are still on route to me. I will come back here and update my experience once I spend some time with them.
 
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Epic story/journey @Substance 😎 Thanks for sharing - and updating! Sounds similar in vain to my own experience. I initially bulked at going into Premiere territory when I started with a Strato and Alto combo but adding it into the mix with a vault and 1U was one of the best decisions. It put the performance and thus the experience on par with Encore for my disc collection - just was the icing on the cake.

Obviously Premiere is now EOL and I personally think that is going to leave a gap for some outside of the 2nd hand market - particularly those with large disc collections - but for now I'm glad I was fortunate enough to be able to have the best of both worlds :)

Enjoy and welcome to the party :cool:
 
I was able to spend some time this weekend and finally install the M700 I bough from 20Hertz. My transaction with 20hertz was a good one. Item was shipped immediately after payment and arrived in the condition described. 20Hertz has been very responsive and kind during our communications too.
 
Thank you for a quick, easy and smooth transaction and quick prompt payment. Happy to hear that everything is working as expected. You have an awesome system and a well laid out plan.

I hope K adds Criterion to its Studio collection soon. This will help add many more movies to our libraries.

Enjoy your system and all the best.
 
I have been importing discs for a couple of weeks now. I have 4 Vaults therefore importing 4 discs at a time. Each import takes about 2-3 hours, this equals to about 30-40 discs a day. Of course this process is completely automated. I know some people compare Kaleidescape to HTPCs. I spent about half an hour to an hour feeding 1280 discs into my 4 Vaults. It will take about a month or two to complete the imports without needing any more of my attention. Imagine doing this on an HTPC (even with multiple disc drives), you would need to insert discs every 2-3 hours and you do this for 1280 discs. That’s a full time job!

I noticed some discs initially missing cover arts gets cover arts later updated in the next business day or two. There must be someone at Kscape doing this manually as it only happens during work hours. It seems like there are some error correction and bad disc check happening during imports too. I have had a couple of discs sat in import for a couple of hours and then (asked to be )ejected for errors. The importing software must have found bad spots on these discs outside the recovery ability of the error correction. These discs didn’t have any scratches but they are a few years old. Disc rot is a known phenomena. I am glad that Kscape software makes sure that the imports are heathy.

I will continue to update here my experience with my CoStar system. I know many of you already know all this but someone new (to Kscape) with a similar goal to mine can benefit from my experience in the future.
 
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