Media Server Manufacturer Wins in Court

whoever57 writes "The DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA) has lost its bid to shut down Kaleidescope, which manufactures media servers that can copy DVDs (along with decryption keys) to built in hard drives. The DVD CCA claimed that this violated the terms of the contracts that control DVD-related equipment because the DVD need not be physically present for payback. However, the judge ruled against the DVD CCA on the narrow grounds that part of the specification of the Content Scrambling System was not part of the overall license agreement. This may open up the market for similar devices."

Comments

Typo

[Anonymous Coward]

Kaleidescape not Kaleidescope (kaleidescape.com)

Price point

[gnetwerker]

These devices cost $27k for a "base" system, and $4k per player. On the one hand, I suppose this means they had enough money to litigate the issue. On the other hand, one can only hope that some competition brings the price point down.

Re:Price point

[Anonymous Coward]

Why bother? Yes, the system seems nice overall, but for a fraction of the price you can get so much more...

Their 3U server maxed out is 9TB (the extra HDs are 700$ each!) That works out to 1344 movies by their numbers.

You could easily fit 1344 movies in 4GB of space in H.264 with basically the same quality. And with the upcoming 1TB drives going for 400$, you could store all this for 1600$ total expense (or just a little more if you need a box to throw the disks into). From there it can be played on any network-enabled player or computer. Want a nicer system? Throw in more disks in a nicer case, and opt for RAID5. 12 of those 1TB HDs in RAID5 in a big case. That's still 11TB total space (more than their biggest server can hold with all the optional disks), and you only spent 4800$ in disks (very far from 27k$, even with a very nice case, a 12 port PCI-e SATA RAID card and all). And 11TB at still excellent video quality (2GB H.264 rips) means 5500 DVDs worth of space -- more movies that I'll ever watch. Hell, that's big enough to throw straight HD DVD backups onto, even at 25GB/movie (still 440 movies).

Their 10k$ 1U server can only hold 37 DVDs (by their math that means a 250GB drive)! That's 270$ per movie it can hold! That's about 40$/GB -- I usually pay around 0.3$/GB. Not only it's 133 times more expensive per GB (without RAID or redundancy or anything either), but they're also wasting it by not using modern MPEG4 encoding, so it's easily 250 times more expensive! This makes buying a new car at twice the price seem like someone's doing you a favor for only charging you double... If someone wanted to sell me a 20k$ car at 250x the price (5M$) it better be more than "just a little nicer"!

For still a LOT less money, one could have a NAS (based on a X-Serve or something) feeing into MythTV and all that. The players could be anything from a mini-ITX system, a game console, tablet PCs or whatever you want (won't cost anywhere near 4k$). There's lots of very good home automation/theater systems going for a LOT less $!

My own knowledge of The Kal

[Anonymous Coward]

Kaleidescape is very nice and far from a massive copy device, it's a storage device. It help save time by centralizing all movies and thus money.

Multimedia tools such as the Kaleidescape have a market niche and should be permitted to exist. It is not a 'pirate tool' just a very convenient way to help handle huge collections, usually by professionals (or rich people).

The business I know using Kaleidescape have around 30 employees that need to watch specific scenes from a bank of 600 movies (and growing). Not to pinpoint them, but it is similar to searching small details in a scene for marketing purposes. They rarely watch more than 5 or 10 minutes after the initial review of a full movie; full reviews are often split between several employees, like 15 minutes each, but never the same scenes.

What the "bad guys" wants is for the business to buy 10, 20 or 30 copies of each movie.

What this business do is buy one copy, put it in the 'Kal and it is available anywhere in the building thru the network. (I think only one access of a single movie at the same time).
Before the 'Kal they had to search everyone's office for an available copy "Do you have movie X? Do you know who has one?" At some point someone started to manage a check-out system (time lost), system never used by high managers bringing movies in vacation and so on.

Worst case, it could be used by some Hotel owner to give free access to every room to the same bank of movies, but as stated, each player is an additional 4K, and once a player starts a movie, another cannot access the same movie. Not a great service for the price.