Zappiti - yay or nay?

[9riffTX]

Just a note that terra speeds are faster than compact terra. ‘7-min 4k downloads‘ are referring to terra, not compact sizes Which in my experience have been about double the time.

 

[alexbeans]

The Strato-C has no storage, it must pull from a Terra or other Encore-class storage device. It is the connected Terra that downloads quickly for viewing on the Strato-C.

I thought that it is the Strato-C that quickly downloads? Which is why folks are selling their Strato-S

 

[thrillcat]

Before I bought my Kaleidescape I had a massive PLEX server using a Shield as the client in the theater. Decent setup. I bought a Zidoo at the start of the pandemic to try and solve a couple issues PLEX was having with a couple of my favorite titles.

The Zidoo was rock solid but the interface was a little lame and I hated having to administer the database through the Zidoo interface rather than at thr PC server side.

Went back to PLEX/Shield and finally got so frustrated with an android TV/Dolby conflict that I bought the K and I couldn’t be happier. Still run the PLEX as a DVR and rare title server via AppleTV but K is the primary source now.

 

[Substance]

I thought that it is the Strato-C that quickly downloads? Which is why folks are selling their Strato-S

Player/Servers: (storage-form factor)
Strato (6TB/10TB-2U)
Strato S (6TB/12TB-1U)

Players:
Strato (Storage-less-2U)
Strato-C (compact size)

Servers:
Terra (24TB/40TB/48TB/72TB/88TB-2U)
Compact Terra (6TB/12TB/18TB/22TB-compact size)

You need a player/server OR a player and a server for a complete system.

Player/Servers have slower download speeds and they will stop downloads if there is a movie playing.

Servers have much faster download speeds and they can serve up to 10 players.

 

[alexbeans]

Player/Servers: (storage-form factor)
Strato (6TB/10TB-2U)
Strato S (6TB/12TB-1U)

Players:
Strato (Storage-less-2U)
Strato-C (compact size)

Servers:
Terra (24TB/40TB/48TB/72TB/88TB-2U)
Compact Terra (6TB/12TB/18TB/22TB-compact size)

You need a player/server OR a player and a server for a complete system.

Player/Servers have slower download speeds and they will stop downloads if there is a movie playing.

Servers have much faster download speeds and they can serve up to 10 players.

I guess in hindsight I should have gotten the Strato-S/ 6TB combo for about $5k used and buy extra Terra storage. I only paid extra for the C because I thought it was the only way to get faster downloads.
Alex

 

[TrackZ]

The K vs. ripped local media server is a debate I've circled through in my entertainment too many times in the last years leading up to my decision to buy into K and still at times leaving me to wonder which is the "better" option. I struggle to find a pure better in the debate. There are simply pros/cons and trade-offs, and it becomes a matter of your needs, abilities, wallet size, and other factors.

Big elements to me that factor are:

For K:

1. Convenience. The process of ripping is generally terrible, time consuming, and a pain. You need to know what you're doing. K is purchase, download, and enjoy with no administration or effort.
2. Potential quality. K can encode to arbitrary sizes vs. many movies being constrained on a BD66 disc. This could result in better video quality. Even the HD encodes on K are often much larger than the HD Blu-rays.
3. Upgrades. K can fix and improve content and seamlessly push that update to you. So may times, I've seen discs issues with problems, then you have to mess around with hoping for a replacement program, sending it back, and all that.
4. Access. Physical media requires a physical purchase at a store or online, waiting for it to ship, waiting longer for the disc to be released for new titles. The entire K library is at my fingertips, usually months earlier than the disc release, no waiting, no paying secondary market prices when a desired title goes out of print (i.e. Gravity).
5. K purchases live in our accounts and live past local storage failing. Provided you have faith in K as a company, your content is safe. When that 100TB of ripped movies goes bye-bye in a surge, flood, fire, or drive failure, it's gone.

For ripping:

1. While the whole process of it is time consuming, there are hints of "fun" with it. I'm an organizer. I like collecting and organizing things methodically. So managing my library, to some extent, exactly how I want it can be enjoyable if it fits your personality. K doesn't elicit the same type of hands-on collecting/ownership. K could if they just added the software features to allow it!
2. A couple years ago, it felt like physical media was really struggling, but through and post-COVID now, it's having an amazing resurgence. The amount of titles being announced is staggering. 4K Blu-ray is really flying. This used to be a plus for K, but I think this has turned around. Physical media gives you generally the greater breadth of catalog and content I think, supported Dolby Vision on some discs, has in a few cases the superior audio codec that K might lack, and other benefits again if you are a collector.
3. I don't like having to store, display, or manage using discs, but ripping makes that go away. Everything is kept nicely in a server on my rack and I can get to the content with ease. I would not even consider using physical media if I had to use it physically.
4. With physical media, it is nice to buy a disc, get the 4K code for MA/iTunes and rip the disc in the same purchase. K purchases exist on their own island and result in having to buy a title twice to get the K version and the iTunes version.
5. With physical media and ripping, it's gray, but you can borrow/trade/buy used/resell and so on with the discs. I quite like the idea of buying a movie, redeeming the code, ripping the disc, and then donating the disc to my library for others to enjoy. It's like a win-win-win scenario.
6. Storage costs are actually reasonable. An 8-bay Synology is <$1,000. A ~18TB hard drive can be bought <$300. With ripping, you can have a ton of storage soooooooo much cheaper than K and thus your entire library you have installed is always available to play without any download time.

The big question is about the future. What will happen in the long run? Is 4K truly the last physical format? If so, then in a matter of years physical and ripping is a dead end street. Then you've spent years doing all this stuff when you should have been building a digital library with K assuming K sustains and grows with the online approach. K can evolve in ways that discs won't. Even if a new physical format comes along, will it even be rippable? Perhaps not. It took a while to even be able to rip 4K discs and then AACS 2.1 almost stopping ripping again. It really is a dead end street at some point. K already evolved successfully once from being physical-based to now being online-based.

But also, someday Apple or others *have* to start streaming higher quality, lossless audio. I think it's inevitable. If you believe that, then both K and ripping are dead ends. The reality is if Apple went high bit rate, I think it's over for these other options. There's just little reason for them to exist. So, I actually advise may folks to just buy an Apple TV, buy all your content with Apple, sit back, enjoy it for the convenience and solid enough quality, and wait. Those folks will be in the ideal seat when the big market shifts happens. That's especially true for folks that lack the funds to buy K or the time/technical knowledge to rip.

The counter-point to this is that is hasn't happened yet. I get disappointed every year when Apple doesn't step up. But we have lossless music now...

Regarding Zappiti/Dune/Zidoo or even Plex/Shield, all of these solutions have short-comings, bugs, and/or ongoing limitations every time I've tried them or continue to read about them in respective owner's threads around the web. K crushes these. K works. No maintenance and with elegance. Yeah, K has bugs too as we discuss here, but nothing on the level of these other devices looking back over time.

 

[alexbeans]

The K vs. ripped local media server is a debate I've circled through in my entertainment too many times in the last years leading up to my decision to buy into K and still at times leaving me to wonder which is the "better" option. I struggle to find a pure better in the debate. There are simply pros/cons and trade-offs, and it becomes a matter of your needs, abilities, wallet size, and other factors.

Big elements to me that factor are:

For K:

1. Convenience. The process of ripping is generally terrible, time consuming, and a pain. You need to know what you're doing. K is purchase, download, and enjoy with no administration or effort.
2. Potential quality. K can encode to arbitrary sizes vs. many movies being constrained on a BD66 disc. This could result in better video quality. Even the HD encodes on K are often much larger than the HD Blu-rays.
3. Upgrades. K can fix and improve content and seamlessly push that update to you. So may times, I've seen discs issues with problems, then you have to mess around with hoping for a replacement program, sending it back, and all that.
4. Access. Physical media requires a physical purchase at a store or online, waiting for it to ship, waiting longer for the disc to be released for new titles. The entire K library is at my fingertips, usually months earlier than the disc release, no waiting, no paying secondary market prices when a desired title goes out of print (i.e. Gravity).
5. K purchases live in our accounts and live past local storage failing. Provided you have faith in K as a company, your content is safe. When that 100TB of ripped movies goes bye-bye in a surge, flood, fire, or drive failure, it's gone.

For ripping:

1. While the whole process of it is time consuming, there are hints of "fun" with it. I'm an organizer. I like collecting and organizing things methodically. So managing my library, to some extent, exactly how I want it can be enjoyable if it fits your personality. K doesn't elicit the same type of hands-on collecting/ownership. K could if they just added the software features to allow it!
2. A couple years ago, it felt like physical media was really struggling, but through and post-COVID now, it's having an amazing resurgence. The amount of titles being announced is staggering. 4K Blu-ray is really flying. This used to be a plus for K, but I think this has turned around. Physical media gives you generally the greater breadth of catalog and content I think, supported Dolby Vision on some discs, has in a few cases the superior audio codec that K might lack, and other benefits again if you are a collector.
3. I don't like having to store, display, or manage using discs, but ripping makes that go away. Everything is kept nicely in a server on my rack and I can get to the content with ease. I would not even consider using physical media if I had to use it physically.
4. With physical media, it is nice to buy a disc, get the 4K code for MA/iTunes and rip the disc in the same purchase. K purchases exist on their own island and result in having to buy a title twice to get the K version and the iTunes version.
5. With physical media and ripping, it's gray, but you can borrow/trade/buy used/resell and so on with the discs. I quite like the idea of buying a movie, redeeming the code, ripping the disc, and then donating the disc to my library for others to enjoy. It's like a win-win-win scenario.
6. Storage costs are actually reasonable. An 8-bay Synology is <$1,000. A ~18TB hard drive can be bought <$300. With ripping, you can have a ton of storage soooooooo much cheaper than K and thus your entire library you have installed is always available to play without any download time.

The big question is about the future. What will happen in the long run? Is 4K truly the last physical format? If so, then in a matter of years physical and ripping is a dead end street. Then you've spent years doing all this stuff when you should have been building a digital library with K assuming K sustains and grows with the online approach. K can evolve in ways that discs won't. Even if a new physical format comes along, will it even be rippable? Perhaps not. It took a while to even be able to rip 4K discs and then AACS 2.1 almost stopping ripping again. It really is a dead end street at some point. K already evolved successfully once from being physical-based to now being online-based.

But also, someday Apple or others *have* to start streaming higher quality, lossless audio. I think it's inevitable. If you believe that, then both K and ripping are dead ends. The reality is if Apple went high bit rate, I think it's over for these other options. There's just little reason for them to exist. So, I actually advise may folks to just buy an Apple TV, buy all your content with Apple, sit back, enjoy it for the convenience and solid enough quality, and wait. Those folks will be in the ideal seat when the big market shifts happens. That's especially true for folks that lack the funds to buy K or the time/technical knowledge to rip.

The counter-point to this is that is hasn't happened yet. I get disappointed every year when Apple doesn't step up. But we have lossless music now...

Regarding Zappiti/Dune/Zidoo or even Plex/Shield, all of these solutions have short-comings, bugs, and/or ongoing limitations every time I've tried them or continue to read about them in respective owner's threads around the web. K crushes these. K works. No maintenance and with elegance. Yeah, K has bugs too as we discuss here, but nothing on the level of these other devices looking back over time.

This is an excellent summary. There really isn’t any losers whichever way you go. I agree with all your points. If I were to pick one reason each, they would be:

Reason for K:
1. Fear of losing all my content if there’s a surge and my Synology RAID craps out.

Reason for ripping:
1. Reasonable storage prices and potential of getting your content cheap by selling your redeemable codes and your used disc after your rip. I usually keep them or donate the bad ones to the library.

 

[TrackZ]

This is an excellent summary. There really isn’t any losers whichever way you go. I agree with all your points. If I were to pick one reason each, they would be:

Reason for K:
1. Fear of losing all my content if there’s a surge and my Synology RAID craps out.

Reason for ripping:
1. Reasonable storage prices and potential of getting your content cheap by selling your redeemable codes and your used disc after your rip. I usually keep them or donate the bad ones to the library.

It always cracks me up reading forum comments where people are like "I would never buy Kaleidescape, what happens to all my movies when they go out of business" followed by "I have 100TB of ripped MKVs on spinning, mechanical hard drives".

Even IF one actually kept all the discs on-hand, is anyone seriously going to rip them all AGAIN!

DIY servers have a higher risk of loss than buying into K does, IMO.

 

[Substance]

It always cracks me up reading forum comments where people are like "I would never buy Kaleidescape, what happens to all my movies when they go out of business" followed by "I have 100TB of ripped MKVs on spinning, mechanical hard drives".

Even IF one actually kept all the discs on-hand, is anyone seriously going to rip them all AGAIN!

DIY servers have a higher risk of loss than buying into K does, IMO.

And discs rot over time. It’s a small percentage but I have some rotted discs which won’t play any longer. I am glad Blu-ray won the format war over HD-DVD because %75 of my HD-DVDs are unplayable now.

 

[alexbeans]

It always cracks me up reading forum comments where people are like "I would never buy Kaleidescape, what happens to all my movies when they go out of business" followed by "I have 100TB of ripped MKVs on spinning, mechanical hard drives".

Even IF one actually kept all the discs on-hand, is anyone seriously going to rip them all AGAIN!

DIY servers have a higher risk of loss than buying into K does, IMO.

I had the misfortune of having 5 years worth of ripping movies disappear because there was an outage when my server was rebuilding. And I had to rip again. But back then I probably only had about 20TB of movies. I bought a UPS Battery Backup and made a point to only rebuild my server (meaning adding new disk drives to my volume) when the weather is good. Each time I rebuild my server, I always get that anxiety feeling that I will lose everything. What I do to mitigate this is to copy my movies into my spare hard-drives as a second back-up. If the cost for cloud services go down, I'll get rid of my workflow in creating a second back-up.

I really don't want to do this anymore which is why I converted to K. I'm approaching 50 and want to eliminate all my clutter. I'm not going to be buried with all my physical discs. So I've been giving them away and keeping only 10% of my favorites on my shelf.

DIY servers do not have a higher risk of loss if you take all the necessary precaution of having redundancy over redundancy. But it is a lot of work!

In the short 6 months of being part of the community, I spent over $15k in hardware and over $500 on digital content through various sales. So I'm still betting on K even if they may go out of business and I lose everything unless I buy the Terra servers to download them.

Alex

 

[alexbeans]

And discs rot over time. It’s a small percentage but I have some rotted discs which won’t play any longer. I am glad Blu-ray won the format war over HD-DVD because %75 of my HD-DVDs are unplayable now.

Disc rot was the reason why I started ripping when I had a small DVD/ Blu-ray collection. It became a smart decision because it's impossible for me to rummage through my collection to find the one movie I want to see. I can't even remember how many HD-DVDs I bought.

 

[DmitryB]

Disc rot was the reason why I started ripping when I had a small DVD/ Blu-ray collection. It became a smart decision because it's impossible for me to rummage through my collection to find the one movie I want to see. I can't even remember how many HD-DVDs I bought.

An update to this: I did get the Zappiti Neo. Have already backed up all my discs. I DID have some discs rot - almost entirely Criterion titles! Found that very interesting.

But - for those that have a Zappiti - I'm re-watching "Twin Peaks," the original series. Something is way off with the color red. All red is orange. Everybody's lipstick is orange. What's up with that? My JVC NZ8 projector was professionally calibrated for both HDR and SDR, and nothing like this happens in Kaleidescape. Is there something in the Zappiti settings that is screwing up the color red?? Anybody have any idea?

Look at the two side-by-side images. The first is grabbed off the screen, the second off my computer. I sent these to the guy who did the calibration and he was like "It's not the projector."

 

[House72]

With K, my Father In law, who is 76, can turn it on, and it works. My wife has no complaints. My niece and nephew, when they come, can use it and have no issues. In simple terms, it works.

The rest of the solutions may have their advantage, but upkeep and maintenance are not as easy. If user adoption is not there, there is no point in having a system. From that standpoint, I would say K has a very distinct advantage.

 

[alexbeans]

An update to this: I did get the Zappiti Neo. Have already backed up all my discs. I DID have some discs rot - almost entirely Criterion titles! Found that very interesting.

But - for those that have a Zappiti - I'm re-watching "Twin Peaks," the original series. Something is way off with the color red. All red is orange. Everybody's lipstick is orange. What's up with that? My JVC NZ8 projector was professionally calibrated for both HDR and SDR, and nothing like this happens in Kaleidescape. Is there something in the Zappiti settings that is screwing up the color red?? Anybody have any idea?

Look at the two side-by-side images. The first is grabbed off the screen, the second off my computer. I sent these to the guy who did the calibration and he was like "It's not the projector.

An update to this: I did get the Zappiti Neo. Have already backed up all my discs. I DID have some discs rot - almost entirely Criterion titles! Found that very interesting.

But - for those that have a Zappiti - I'm re-watching "Twin Peaks," the original series. Something is way off with the color red. All red is orange. Everybody's lipstick is orange. What's up with that? My JVC NZ8 projector was professionally calibrated for both HDR and SDR, and nothing like this happens in Kaleidescape. Is there something in the Zappiti settings that is screwing up the color red?? Anybody have any idea?

Look at the two side-by-side images. The first is grabbed off the screen, the second off my computer. I sent these to the guy who did the calibration and he was like "It's not the projector."

I don’t have the problem. My red is red. I would know because I recently watched Deadpool and would have noticed Deadpool being orange. Maybe you have a defective unit? Get a replacement.

 

[alexbeans]

With K, my Father In law, who is 76, can turn it on, and it works. My wife has no complaints. My niece and nephew, when they come, can use it and have no issues. In simple terms, it works.

The rest of the solutions may have their advantage, but upkeep and maintenance are not as easy. If user adoption is not there, there is no point in having a system. From that standpoint, I would say K has a very distinct advantage.

My family has complaints with the K’s user interface saying that it is difficult finding movies with K. So they use my Plex library. They don’t like Zappiti’s interface too. Other solutions have a greater upkeep and maintenance but they benefit by being cheaper alternatives. During the past 2 months with the crappy economy, I had to cut down on my K movie purchases.

 

[DmitryB]

I don’t have the problem. My red is red. I would know because I recently watched Deadpool and would have noticed Deadpool being orange. Maybe you have a defective unit? Get a replacement.

It happens I watched "Deadpool 2" today on Zappiti. The reds were fine. So...I don't know why "Twin Peaks" looks like that...

 

[DmitryB]

My family has complaints with the K’s user interface saying that it is difficult finding movies with K. So they use my Plex library. They don’t like Zappiti’s interface too. Other solutions have a greater upkeep and maintenance but they benefit by being cheaper alternatives. During the past 2 months with the crappy economy, I had to cut down on my K movie purchases.

The only time I have "difficulties" with K interface is that after you select a movie - the default option is to Return to the menu. You have to scroll down one to Play the movie. I usually forget and just assume pressing Enter and Enter will play the movie. Alas, after going back to the main menu I remember I have to do one extra step to actually Play.

 

[House72]

@alexbeans @DmitryB I appreciate and understand your message. If i have to be honest K is the simple solution but the expensive solution.

 

[cinelife]

The only time I have "difficulties" with K interface is that after you select a movie - the default option is to Return to the menu. You have to scroll down one to Play the movie. I usually forget and just assume pressing Enter and Enter will play the movie. Alas, after going back to the main menu I remember I have to do one extra step to actually Play.

I may be misunderstanding your point, but if you want to play a movie with one button push why not just press "Play?"


Jim

 

[JohnJ]

I may be misunderstanding your point, but if you want to play a movie with one button push why not just press "Play?"


Jim

Yes, and you can do this either from the main menu or the movie detail page.

John