I still have fond memories of my bajillion-disc DVD player. This was back in the early 2000s, when switching between Go and Fight Club without getting off the sofa was still impressive.
Now we have fancy movie servers from luxury A/V companies like Kaleidescape. Instead of switching between discs, the swanky Cinema One rips pristine copies of your Blu-rays and DVDs and plays them from its own 4TB hard drive. The Cinema One’s local playback also happens to trim a lot of fat; movies play with no disc menu, no trailers, no FBI warnings, and no awkward propaganda. It’s a great solution, at least in theory, for anyone who wants fast, easy, picture-perfect access to their aging disc collection. Of course, there's a pretty massive catch, but I'll get to that in a moment.
At almost $4,000, Kaleidescape was smart to sidestep the cheap "little black box" look of most movie servers. It’s a little heavy at 10 pounds, but the angular metal chassis, smooth white face, and recessed single-disc slot-drive give it living room-friendly looks. (The few people who noticed it next to my TV mistook it for a "fancy TiVo," which is a passing grade in my book.) The remainder of the rear panel delivers exactly what you’d expect from a modern movie server: single HDMI, analog, coax, and ethernet ports.
Boot up is relatively fast—under 10 seconds in most cases. The Cinema One’s 4TB of space can hold about 100 Blu-rays (or 600 DVDs) total, so there was already plenty of stuff to watch on my review unit. The default menu, a colorful animated mosaic of movie cover art, is incredibly easy to navigate with the Cinema One’s no-frills remote. You can search via alphabetical list too, thanks to the exhaustive metadata Kaleidescape sources on the backend. Though the UI felt a little sparse at times—no extraneous TV apps here!—it never felt bare or unpolished.
The Cinema One’s playback performance is, in a word, awesome. Pressing “Play” on the The Dark Knight Returns immediately dimmed the screen to black. After a beat of silence the opening title cards faded in along with the overwrought Hans Zimmer score. It was like I pressed “Play” on a Blu-ray, wandered off during the pre-roll filler, and sat back down right at the feature start. Even better, everything I played on the Cinema One started in this same seamless fashion.