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Kaleidescape CEO Speaks Out About CSS Lawsuit
An anonymous reader writes "Engadget has an interview with Michael Malcolm, the CEO of Kaleidescape, which you might remember as the high-end DVD jukebox manufacturer that was sued by the DVD Copy Control Association for violating its CSS license.
Despite the fact that anyone who can afford a $27,000+ DVD jukebox also usually ends up buying
hundreds of movies to load onto it, the DVD-CCA wants
them to redesign the Kaleidescape to require the presence of
the physical DVD disc in the drive during authentication and playback.
Besides defeating the whole purpose of having a jukebox in the first
place (none of their jukeboxes allow for copying, streaming, or sharing
DVDs), Malcolm says he can't find any clause in their CSS license which
would require them to implement this "feature" anyway and they're about
to file a counter-action against the DVD-CCA."
I think DVD-CCA is indeed afraid of two billionaires swapping 78 pounds Kaleidescapes on their 50-foot yachts in the open sea.
With the proposed protection feature, they'll have to bring out their DVDs for the exchange too.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Not here anyway.
"I just loaded my DVD into my Jukebox... I don't need the DVD anymore, so I guess I'll go sell it on ebay or give it away..."
That's what they're afraid of, and they're probably right.
I don't get the benfit of a system costing $27-100k, when you can put something together for 5x less.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
the term "Money-grubbing SCUM" comes immediately to mind.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
It's nice to see companies standing up to the class bully...
One day everyone will realize that the bully just had a self-esteem problem. Let's hope that day comes soon.
Of course, this can be done at the client, by sticking a DVD in the playback client. The client, of course caches the keys extracted from that DVD, so this only has to be done once. For large numbers of DVDs on the jukebox that one wants to make accessable to a given client, just burn a CD (or DVD) with the whole set of keys that the client can cache, or explicitly push the keys to the known authenticated clients (or some desired subset thereof).
Sheesh, this isn't rocket science.
You could've hired me.
(none of their jukeboxes allow for copying, streaming, or sharing DVDs)
Not sure that's really a necessary part of being a jukebox! A jukebox is specifically a machine into which you load a bunch of disks and then tell it which one(s) to play.
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves
(nt)
Seems pretty risky to spend years in court for this. By the time this suit is finished, some other format may be on the market (HD-DVD, BluRay, whatever..) and the people who could afford this sort of thing will be purchasing newer technology.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
The license?
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
" The basic unit starts at $27,000 and some go up to $100,000 for additional storage"
This is ridiculous, and why does the storage make that much difference? Can't you just add your own cheap storage, this thing is way overpriced!
- sigs are for wimps.
The fact that people buy it is how he figures it. Things are worth what people are willing to pay for them.
You will find yourself taking messures that in any other situations would be ridicoulous. This happends with copyright, it's an UNNATURAL law, and so, it's unenforceable. If you try to charge people for the air they breath, or for what they think about, you will find that this are basic freedoms of the human been, and that, because of their nature, it's allmost impossible to measure / control / quote them. But there is a HUGE bussines built arround copyright low, and the big boys making tons of money out of it won't just let it go, so, expecto more and more ridicolous ideas and restrictive methods in the future. They just won't stop.
ALMAFUERTE
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
It might not make sense to you, but to the really rich people they are being marketed to, 27k isn't that much. If you can afford to blow 100k+ a weekend in Vegas you probably don't care if some new toy costs 27k as long as its cool.
.agrippa.
Exactly. I put together my home theater PC for about $500 (software & hardware) plus around $5/movie for storage space. It not only gives me my movies on-demand, but is a PVR also. It even upconverts DVD playback to 1080i resolution, which looks absolutely stunning.
People who buy the $27K setups have money to waste.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
The CEO states: "we've heard customers tell us they had stopped buying DVDs for about two years because they had no place to store them".
Not being rich, I don't know, but are these guys buying the same DVD's I get from Wal-Mart?
I have around 300 DVD's and they take up 1/2 of a 7ft. tall bookshelf.
I would assume rich people would have a huge house and therefore not have to worry about the few cubic feet of storage space even a 1000 dvd's take up. (time for me to think of useless things to sell to dumb rich people).
umm did you RTFA? A 400 dvd carousel isnt going to power 8 diferent plasma screens and a huge projector all with different movies all in 1080i now is it. nor is it expandable and adaptible like this system is.
dont get me wrong i'm not going to buy one, but the is alot more to it.
What license? It's a commercial, off-the-shelf Sony product.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Some people would rather buy a dedicated piece of store bought hardware than cobble together a righteous hack out of stone knives and bearskins, no matter how much duct tape they own. Go figure!
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
"a $27,000+ DVD jukebox"
Betcha cain't rest your beer on it and cry about yer lost love...
Gotta have Dolly parton onit...
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Their suit says that Kaleidescape must redesign its system to require the presence of the physical DVD disc in the drive during authentication and playback.
"I forgot my password. Can you reset it?"
"Sure, what's your password?"
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
People who buy the $27K setups have money to waste.
:)
Or they're getting older, and are willing to spend the money so they can husband the precious time they have left doing other things.
Futzing with hardware when you enjoy it is one thing. Futzing with hardware when you'd rather be doing something else is another. Besides, why complain? You should try selling your setup to some of these guys for the mere price of $20k
"Prior to playback, the data from the original DVD is decoded into memory and stored there for a period of time. In this instance, the memory is magnetic media rather than memory chips on the system board."
I don't see a violation especially as no method for extracting the decoded data exists to my understanding of this device. I think the DVD-CCA is being [surprisingly?] overzealous with their issues here. But who knows... something good could come of this if the DVDCCA loses as I suspect they will.
Great, let's ban these box model hacks and have pure CSS defended in court!
--
#me {
ducking: deep;
}
How is this different from the feature in Mac OS X which lets you drag copy a mounted DVD to your hard disc for playback later? You just need to have the physical DVD disc in the drive the first time Apple's DVD Player plays the hard disc version to prove that you own the physical DVD. I guess it must copy the DVD CSS key to your hard disc somewhere.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Just a thought, they want to verify that the disc is a legitimate copy before the movie is shown right?
How about having the DVD-Jukebox thing hooked to an actual DVD Holding Jukebox, so it can verify the disc exists before allowing the content to be unlocked. It could cache the key in memory, and the keys would be purged if the disc is removed from the jukebox. (or if the jukebox is opened or something).
Advantage, you would still have your nice system
Disadvantage: If you have several people all wanting to play different discs you are going to have to wait for each disc to be read and its key cached.
You would still have the problem that they want the disc durring playback, hmm. Maybe this is an OK compromise though because you have to have the disc to do anything any way and if the disc isn't there it can't be verified and thus can't be played. Either that or setup a DVD Holding jukebox with several drives that can hold the discs.
Or just claim the entire DVD Holding jukebox is a drive, and thus all the discs are in the drive, their is just some high access time for some discs.
The truth is, that someone that pays over $30,000 for a DVD system (the people that can afford the system are probably going to not settle for the bare minimum $27,000 configuration) are not interested in screwing over the MPAA. Many of these customers are probably music and movie stars anyhow. They buy it for the unique experience of the well-built UI and the convenience of the system. They don't care if a DVD costs $20 or $100.
Of course, the lawsuit is more about the long term possibilities... that someday this type of system will be available at lower prices, and then the studios will get ripped off. But still, the lawsuit is absurd. Especially since the complaint is that this device permits the "wholsale copying of DVDs, which CSS was designed to prevent." If that were true then any DVD-ROM drive would be in violation. I think CSS is not so much to prevent copying of DVDs, but to prevent unauthorized playback. I wish the DVD-CCA would stop abusing the purpose of their precious CSS.
The Kaleidescape is a great device, I would be very sad to see it get buried by people who see it as the threat that it isn't.
$50-60 per DVD on their hardware. And obviously, there's a market where people don't want to assemble and debug their entertainment center themselves.
Wake up.
I just take the movie off the shelf I bought from IKEA for 20 bucks and put it in my DVD player.
Movies-On-Demand...
People who buy $500 setups have money to waste.
Basically all the movies you'd ever want. As quick as you can get them from your company of choice.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Who gave DVD-CCA mod points?!?!
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
The newest ruling requires the whole cast and crew of a film to be present - living or deceased - in order to play a movie...
Though the requirement will be an adjustment for some, once viewers get used to handling shovels and arranging for flights and hotel stays, they should get back to just enjoying their films...
considering the only people likely to be able to afford this thing are Hollywood folks.
*cough*NetFlix*cough*
Could the fear be that if you load the DVD to storage, you can also change the format? They want to be able to find the "next medium" in a couple of years, and then entice you to purchase all of your assets again. I've done this already with Cassette/Album to CD, and VHS to DVD...
If it's in storage, the medium isn't important. When the next format comes along, so do tools for conversion.
I was in SAM's last week just browsing when something caught my eye. It was a typical looking rectangle plastic DVR but what was interesting was the removable drive bay built into it. It was only ~$250 and had all of the inputs you could ever want except HD. I think that would make a pretty decent jukebox for my home system.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Doesn't windows + DVD reader + Hard Drive also violate this?
Rich people don't know better.
Know better? They don't give a shit. When your house costs $10 million, and you've got $500,000 worth of custom-installed home theater gear, plasma screen TVs, multiroom audio and video, etc., an additional $27k or even $100k isn't that much to spend to ensure that you can watch any of your movies from any of your screens any time you want. It's a helluvalot more elegant and intuitive than some hack-it-together-yourself DVR or DVD caching box. Besides, you're going to be taking your family on a holiday to Barcelona or Shanghai or Aspen during the couple of weeks it takes to get that whole thing installed, configured, tested and debugged. And you probably will pay Kaleidescape the money to duplicate your entire DVD collection onto the hard drives so you don't have reload them yourself, or have your personal electrical engineer spend a week loading your DVDs onto the system.
Besides, if I'm some rich guy who's spent that much on his house and electronics, I'm showing off my latest "I'm cooler-than-you" gadgets to my other ultra-rich friends before we head off to cruise the Mediterranean in my private yacht. The people who buy this are the same people who buy the Ford GT (~$140k), the Mercedes SL65 AMG (~$140k), the Bentley Arnage T (~$250k), the Maybach 57 ($~$330k) or the Porsche Carrera GT (~$440k). The cost is irrelevant--it's all about the cool.
BTW: The CEO of the company I work for has recently bought both a Ford GT (~$140k) and a Mercedes SL65AMG (~$140k). That's to go along with the BMW 760Li (~$90k) he already owns, his $14 million Learjet, his $12 million house, etc.
If you got 27k$+ to spend on a jukebox, I think the last thing you'd be worried with is saving 15$ on a DVD. You're already spending twice the price of the movie to make a copy of it on the jukebox, so price isn't exactly a concern to start with. People copying movies from netflix and the like copy them to DVDRs that cost pennies, not onto players that cost more than my car.
Why sure, I'm going to buy a $27,000 machine to copy DVD's that I actually bought, because I can't afford them. That would be much smarter then using a $400 PC to get them off of Bittorrent.
Once the **AA's decide to embrace digital distribution instead of attempting to squash it, they'll make the same killing they have off every other technology they fought at first. Remember, radio and, later, the cassette tape were going to be the end of the music business. We're tired of hearing that the sky is falling. Start adapting your business model to technology, and quit telling us to adapt technology to your business model.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
I guess Lucas is guilty of pirating his own films . . . The concept of extreme protection of digital content is really getting out of hand when someone like Lucas can't legally "backup" his films onto another media. I don't really understand this when no one prosecutes the average Joe from copying a CD to tape or CD to MP3 player for convenience . . . Isn't this all that the Kaleidescope box does? Copies from one media to another for ease and convenience?
If you can do it with music, then why can't you do it with movies?
An innovative startup company is being sued by Random House and other publishers for a product which can hold the text and figures of up to 500 books. Their new product stores the words and pictures of of up to 500 novels, paperbacks, or coffee table books and allows any one of the thousands of words and pictures to be accessed in an instant. Called the "bookshelf", the new product goes on sale starting at $49.99. Publishers complain that there is nothing to prevent the owner of this data-storage system from making photocopies of the books, lending the books , or reading the books and then selling them at a discount to others. The publishers claim that if the technology is not regulated, it has the, potential to destroy the publishing industry, leaving thousands of editors starving on the streets of New York.
mplayer mms://www.kaleidescape.com/TheKaleidescapeExperien ce
the -dumpstream option will save to file, ~11MB. Although save to file may be illegal as you aren't watching via the authorised player :/
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
This quote is the one that made me laugh out loud, and shows that we (meaning the Linux/Slashdot/techie crowd) just aren't getting through to the proper people so that changes can be made. [Note: TT is "The Tech" and JV is "Jack Valenti"]
During all his time presiding over the MPAA, he didn't even realize the enormity of the problem. That sends the message that word justisn't getting out. This case, should Michael Malcolm be successful and gain some ground, may finally allow Linux users to legally play DVD's they bought with their own money.
People at all income levels can be thieves. I doubt you could find any correlation between income level and thievery. As one poster commented, why not just add every NetFlix rental to their jukebox?
signature pending slashdot approval
Listen folks, it's really fucking simple here.
YOU created this monster. Just like South Park's "Walmart" episode--who is number 1? YOU are.
The "threat" of DVD has been known for years. The DVDCCA came up with consumer-hostile garbage from day one: CSS, Region Encoding (aka RESTRAINT OF TRADE), and Macrovision in every pot (sorry, under every TV). YOU BOUGHT INTO IT. You just HAD to have your fucking "Matrix" DVD, didn't you? Nevermind all the problems with DVD--look at DIVX! HAH what fools! Right.
And now we have "big brother" DVD-CCA clubbing people over the head for violating their bullshit license for their bullshit "encryption" which has already been compromised 100 ways from Sunday. We STILL have region encoding despite the fact that it IS restraint of trade. And YOU allowed it. Every one of you that ran out to get a DVD player and filling your shelves with boxed-sets of whatever--you allowed this to happen.
So do NOT bitch about the DVDCCA. You fucking gave them the power. And you know what? Now that you let them stick their foot in the door JUST A LITTLE, they're going to try and see what ELSE they can get away with...the "broadcast" flag, the bending-over of TiVo...it's going to get worse because YOU, the drooling hordes, couldn't stop for ONE moment to say "hey, this is just a candy-coated fish hook!" Nope, GOTTA have that latest anime collection! Just GOTTA get that Matrix DVD Boxed Set!
Now go ahead--do your Slashdot duty...whine about the DVDCCA and how they "don't get it." Contradict me by saying "so? You can just get a hacked player!" (Yeah, and Apex is SUCH great quality too *snort*). Somehow tie Bittorrent into the conversation (it's just not slashdot if you're not blathering about how great bittorrent is). Mod me down to nothing. Continue preaching to the choir.
...is exactly what the DVD-CCA is doing with this suit.
Sure, right now it's not a real issue. But imagine a consumer-level device that works in a similar manner. Storage is getting cheaper and cheaper, etc. It will come, sooner or later.
THEN they will have a real problem on their hands, with nobody buying DVDs, just paying a 24-hour rental fee and then returning them, while keeping the content on their media boxes (made by Kaleidascape or not) forever.
So this lawsuit is not about current problems... but it has serious implications for the future. At least that's what the DVD-CCA thinks.
Me, I couldn't care less. I've built my networked home media system quite some time ago.
We need more legal precedents that show that time and space shifting recorded performances that we legally own is a legal practice. We have these rights, fair use of our copies that we own. But until its documented in legal precedent in the modern age, copyright owners will see a chance to intimidate and scam their way to suck up our rights to add margins to their bottom line at our expense.
--
make install -not war
They're outright liars.
I was one of the good number of people named in the DeCSS case. I was offering a mirror of DeCSS on my site, in the hopes that people would be inspired to build a Linux DVD player package around it (or, at a minimum, that they could have used the Windows binaries to rip DVDs and then play them under Linux).
They sent me an email saying that because I hadn't responded to their earlier email, they were taking me to court.
Only problem is... I grepped my entire mail spool forwards, backwards and sideways (I never delete mails to my home email box, except spam, and even then rarely; I like being able to search for anything I've received) and could not find any previous email.
I called them, emailed them, etc., trying to ask them why they are claiming that I received a previous email when I didn't. Naturally I got nowhere.
I ended up having to sign an agreement basically stating that I'll never license or sell CSS technology. Over a lie of theirs.
(Not like I would license or sell their shit, but a sufficiently slimy lawyer-- and they have plenty-- would be able to argue that selling a used DVD-ROM drive (or a used DVD!) on eBay violates the agreement I made with them...)
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
It is worse than price being irrelevant.
Your post talks about the "cooler than you" factor.
Well, in some cases, a higher price can get a higher demand, due to the impression that something is better because it is more expensive. Better meaning "cooler", highher quality, etc.
The demand curve isn't merely flat, it slopes in a counter-intuitive way.
There is a whole price range at which there is little software ever sold. Too expensive for the cheap people and too cheap for the people who are used to paying big bucks. I don't know what that range is at the moment.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Tesla is the mind behind Westinghouse. Edison is the mind behind Edison.
Besides Edison's electrons can kill you, whereas Tesla's are much safer.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
I wouldn't actually mind so much playing movies from the DVD if they didn't force me to sit through trailers every time (are you listening, Disney?), not to mention an ugly 30-second animated intro to the menu, with which I can't actually choose "play" until I've sat through the whole goddamned intro.
This is a huge mistake of an assumption, I think. I base this on having worked for and known several very rich people. In truth, most rich people (with the exception of rappers and such) are cheap, that's part of how they got rich. At one time in the distant past, I was Loyal Nordstrom's personal chef (in a previous life, I was a chef for a few rich people and at a restaurant in the Seattle Sheraton as well as the Esplanade in Portland). One year she gave all us little people designer toilet paper for Christmas... I'm sure that many of these people shop and sell on Ebay all the time. Or perhaps they have their "people" do it for them, but it gets done.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Maybe the MPAA wants to stop this now before that becomes a reality. If they permit this sort of thing now they may be unable to stop it later.
Uh, why would you need a Kaleidescape when you have a computer? The only reason would be if, while you were OK with copyright infringement, you still didn't want to disobey the DMCA - but if Kaleidescape takes the fall, you won't even be innocent of that. So really - just buy a computer and a shitload of hard drives.
Wow.
You know, some people actually want things that you don't. To them, it's not "wasting" money.
Kinda like how people "with" money sometimes buy cars that I wouldn't be able to get within 5 feet of because of how much it is worth... Just because it is a waste in your eyes doesn't mean it's a waste to the person buying it.
Karnal
Now with the server on smb, or xns, and multiple xboxs with xbmc it will do the same.
And dude, if i had a $10m house, i wouldnt waste 27k, id rather do it myself for 3k, and spend the other 24k on my friends/relos/birthdays.
More overpriced goodies = higher insurance.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
I, for one, strongly support Cascading Style Sheets and I think they ought to be supported by all DVD players
RP
The editorial implies that the piracy argument is a canard. The real reason is that the DVD CCA is a cartel led by the largest consumer electronics manufacurers. They don't want Kaleidescape to succeed because they don't have a competing product.
Just buy 16 200GB drives ($75 each this week at Frys), put them in a couple of supertower, and you could build the same thing with infinitely more flexibility for maybe $5000. Run GigE through your yacht.
If I had that kind of money I surely wouldn't put up with inferior tech.
There's always someone who wants to blame the victim. I guess they enjoy looking down on people by accusing them of being too stupid to see what's in their own interest.
Obviously, we'd rather buy the stuff and fight for the right to use it than make the point moot by doing without. That's not drooling, that's fighting for what you want and what you believe in. If Anonymous Coward doesn't want to join us, that's okay.
-- . . ramblin' . . .
Congratulations! You're the target market for this $27k dvd player!
I'd rather be lucky than good.
Whoever modded this insightful needs a brain. All them filthy rich billionaires that bother pirating DVDs, I tell ya...
I assume you're referring to Slashdot's use of kludgy, bloated, nonstandard markup. I, too, wonder about this.
Is there a real reason Slashdot doesn't use modern markup? Others have already done the work. So what's the hold-up?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
If it's trivially improvable, then that's lovely. But my point is that the current HTML generation is bloaty and breaks Firefox sometimes. (Though Firefox should handle whatever gets thrown at it, this wouldn't be an issue if the code were standardized.)
So, my point---what's stopping Slashdot from modernizing its markup? The potential traffic savings are significant, and it won't spontaneously break on some browsers. Not to mention that as a shimmering beacon of open source fanboys everywhere, Slashdot should showcase some of those open standards we yammer on about all the time.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Please learn how to use links.
y /eCS/Store/en/-/USD/SY_DisplayProductInformation-S tart?ProductSKU=DVPCX985V&Dept=hav&CategoryName=ha v_HiFiComponents_SuperAudioCD
Oh, wait, you did. Stupid Slashdot. You probably used the "Extrans" setting. Try "Plain Old Text" next time. Also, use "Preview".
Here is the link: http://www.sonystyle.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinit
A semicolon in CSS is a separator, as in Pascal, not a line terminator, as in C. As such, you don't need one if you have a single style element.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If you read my comments then you'll regularly see I get confused with acronyms.
Who els read this as Cascading Style Sheets?
'I am become Shiva, destroyer of worlds'
I've had those problems, and worked out some what of a method to fix them. I don't know how I noticed, however, when ever I log out, Slashdot is perfect. So, I usually only login when I want to make a comment (except this one :-) )
I can't say whether the DVD-CCA is going to win this lawsuit. That depends on the exact wording of their contract with Kaleidescape. But on the general principle of requiring the disc to be physically present to play it, I think they have a point.
There are two ways of looking at the rights you get when you buy a DVD. You have bought an object, or you have licensed some content. You see both of these invoked on Slashdot. Firstly: 'I bought the DVD and paid for it, I have every right to play it on my Linux system if I wish. Copyright law only restricts copying, not usage.' The second way of thinking appears in arguments like: 'I paid for the music, if I want to make a spare copy for backups or to listen to in the car, why should I have to buy the same CD again?'.
These two views are to some extent opposed to each other. It's really just a personal gut feeling, but I think that the first model - you bought the disc and now you own it but copyright restricts making copies - is fairer and more civilized. I don't fancy living in a world where content is 'licensed' rather than bought. It could be old-fashioned but I'd prefer DVDs to be treated more like books. You don't license a book, you own it - but of course you need it to be physically there in order to read it.
A system which requires that the DVD be present in order to play it seems fair to me. It's an arbitrary restriction but one which is simple to understand and hard for the copyright holder to exploit monopolistically (for example, it makes it hard for them to segment the market and charge different prices to different people). It preserves the idea that you can mostly do what you want with goods you own, including reselling them.
Now the DVD-CCA cannot eat their cake and have it still. If physical possession of the disc is what matters then there is no justification for region coding or other such nastiness. But I never said I agree with their position in general, just that requiring the disc to be present (and so in only one place at a time) might not be such a bad idea in itself.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
People keep talking about things thing being OK or not based on the price. Price change, and in computers they change FAST.
The cost of storage has gone from Dollars per Megabyte 20 years ago to Pennies per Gigabyte today. In 5 years or so people will be able to make something like this from upgrade leftovers.
Lets just say the *AA have learned from the MP3/P2P situation to be insanely agressive towards any possible technological threats to their revenue stream.
For those who say that the Kaleidescape system is a rip-of: I built my own media server system in my house (3.5TB, gigE, massive powerhouse system) but it never was as smooth to use as I would have liked. I purchased a Kaleidescape and within a month I had sold my old media server. Just a rundown of how cool the Kaleidescape is. It does to your DVD collection what TiVo has done to broadcast TV. Some of the cool features: When you choose a movie to watch, it goes to the beginning of the film - bypassing forced ads, menus, FBI warnings, etc. If you want to get to the DVD menu, you can choose play disc instead of play movie. When integrated with a control system - it will automatically adjust your screen masking system to the exact ratio of the film. It will dim the lights and when the film is paused it will raise the lights. It will also automatically raise the lights when the credits roll. Put the DVD in the tray to incorporate it into the system. No other user intervention is required. If the film is not in the system (from personal experience this is VERY RARE) then you just type in the UPC code on the web interface and its information will appear in 1-2 days. The film is still accessible in the interim. If you have a very rare disc or something they cannot find, they will ship you a box to send it to them in. They pay shipping both ways. The system can support an unlimited number of servers, players and readers and can handle 7 active DVD streams at once or 2 active HD streams at once (or a combination of the two). Expanding a server is simple - slide in a new cartridge. Upgrade takes no tools, doesn't need to power the system down and requires 10 seconds. Sort your entire collection by title, genre, actor, director, year or length with the push of a button. Look through collection by lists or graphically by cover art. System can re-arrange cover art to group similar movies on the fly (way cool!) if you are just browsing and don't know exactly what you want to see. Bookmark your own collection of favorite scenes. These can be selected from a menu individually or play them all one after the next. Pause a movie in one room, resume it in the next room. Adjust for overscan from the set-up menu in each player - you can see the overscan your display has and adjust for it very easily. Watch multiple movies in multiple rooms or the same movie in multiple rooms at different points in the film. mpossible with DVD changers! Set-up parental controls on selected players and they cannot even see there are movies on the server that are forbidden. (No explaining to the wife who Jenna Jameson is or why the kids can't watch Boogie Nights) Automatic download of high resolution cover art and film synopsis. Player will output component, composite, S-Video and HDMI simultaneously. It will also output S/PDIF via CO-AX and Toslink at the same time. Player has Faroudja DCDi and will scale output. Player will automatically select preferred audio track (DTS for me) even if it isn't the default track. For films that have both fullscreen and widescreen on the same disc, you can choose which format you want to watch it. This choice is player specific so you can set a small kids TV to 4:3 and keep your theater in widescreen. System is easy to install - just plugs into the existing Cat5e network in your house. (Although people have reported using wireless successfully, wired is strongly recommended). Sorry for the long post, but this thing kicks ass and I love it as much as I love TiVo.