NEWS: Kaleidescape to support Blu-ray! (official)

[sshearer]

Jim,

Thank you for your reply and "reading between the lines" of the dealer letter. I certainly hope and anticipate that you are correct. If they don't offer upgraded HDMI audio and 1080p/24 video, I think they would lose a lot of potential customers and end up with some very unhappy current customers. I am happy to hear that they want to produce a player that will be competitive with the other higher end blu-ray players in the marketplace. By 2009, I would assume most all new blu-ray players (other than possibly the very low end) will be offering True HD and similar audio through the HDMI connector and the 1080p/24 video. Hopefully KScape will also make sure that the player offers the latest blu-ray profiles available.

Scott

[cinelife]

I agree Scott. It is likely that within a year all BR players will be able to support HD audio decoding within the player, so I also (like you) would expect the K-Player to do the same.

Jim

[josh]

Originally Posted by iansilv

I for one would pay a small fee for each bluray disk copy to a Kscape server. ...

Originally Posted by iansilv

That said, if I can't skip warnings, trailers, menus and just start the movie, I am not interested at all. So studios- give K owners the convenience that tey enjoy with dvds or lose money. It's that simple. At least from me.

Me too Ian... I completely agree with your statements. I'd pay a reasonable, one-time fee for the convenience of storing my purchased BR movie on the server. But I won't put up with the annoying lock-outs and forced ads and warnings before my movie.
--josh

[josh]

Originally Posted by cinelife

That really would not be difficult for K to implement. Write the software to recognize the importing of a BR disk and bill the owner for that copy. Of course that would require some new accounting setup and a section at K to handle that process, which is probably not cost effective for K and not likely to happen, but it is possible.

Actually, I suspect they may be building such a transaction engine anyway. They're practically pre-announcing that they'll offer a content download service at some point, so they'll need the ability to bill their customers for content anyway. Adding in the billing of "managed copy license" purchases would be simple in that case.

--josh

[Beoliving]

As potential new customer for a K System (exploring others as well, but K is on the top of the list in the moment) the anouncement of Blue Ray support are great news!

To give it a positive spin, the long time to the 2009 release of the new player can be used to consider and budget some serious server upgrades. (the sales guys at K must be very supportive of these news...). Reading in an other post calculating 1.000 US for 1TB disk would be a dream for me as the MSRP in Euro in my country is 1.650 Euro (roughly 2.400 US$) incl. VAT.

From the storage point of view, a 1U server is hard to justify anymore as it will be filled up quite quickly with HD content (that was the server I had on my list until yesterday...)

Also very interesting if K will enter the "movie on demand/download" business. At the end of the day this is the most obvious business model for me as we store the content on a HDD anyway and put the DVD in a big dark box somewhere. Just go the K movie store, download the stuff to the server and you are done. For the film studios by far the best solution to have the content on a closed system like the K. Much more secure than selling a disc!

Karsten

[JerryL]

A few random thoughts on our (excellent) discussion so far.

First on HD capacity. Although K doesnt currently offer the 1tb drives, they are out there now- maybe (fingers crossed) there will be larger capacities by the time they get around to the actual retail offerings.

Second on licensing fees. Everything you all say is true- they could implement a system to charge us every X views or whatever they want but I think we would all find this an annoyance or difficult to digest. I agree that K is not going to subsidize our "right" to import movies and I also agree that our ability will come along as part of an industry wide MMC agreement. I could see, though, K working with the industry to get us a Blu Ray customer licensing agreement with one time bulk licensing fee- they would have to find a way to keep this fee to a manageable number- maybe $500? but this would allow for lifetime imports, etc.

An interesting on MMC- what will it allow? Maybe it will or could allow one to make a back up copy to a hard drive and if MMC allows you to make a downscaled copy (via some kind of software) for use on a portable player such as an ipod, then maybe K will someday offer something similar to what they offer with audio: some form of itunes integration- making the Kaleidescape system even more of a hub for the home. Along this line Kaleidescape might want to consider offering iphoto and imovie (as well as their PC counterparts) streaming/ access to complete the Kaleidescape as a digital media hub in the home. In the end it would end up being similar to a very high end Apple TV.

Downloads- in an interview somewhere I read Michael Malcolm saying that their original vision was downloads so maybe some day it would be possible. I think right now with the resolution demands of HD + the bandwidth out there, it is possible but not easy. Probably 99% of Ks customer base has high speed internet and therefore its probably not a problem if you wanted to order the latest HD movie and let it download overnight.

1080P/24. Great feature that I think everyone wants. Heres the wrinkle- I believe the DVD standard does not allow for scaling up beyond 1080i. So when you play from a DVD file you will either want a video processor or accept what your TV scales to. In my home we have a theater with a video processor where I run 480i over HDMI to my processor and in my other rooms I just run 480P over component video to my plasmas/ LCDs. Also how many displays support 24hz playback- not many and there are those that can support 48hz but not 24. So I would like to suggest a fairly robust set of options on the video output side- allow us 24/48/72/96/120! playback. Id also like to see a set of picture quality controls. It may also be useful to have a lip sync control.

HDMI. I have it on pretty good authority from a friend in the industry - not at K! at another company which is more concerned with the audio side of things- they are concerned about how bad HDMI is with digital audio jitter and he says that they will be making a push to not use HDMI but rather this newer technology called DisplayPort. Its supposedly more flexible than HDMI and better yet is it handles audio in a much more preferable way to HDMI. I think the best argument though for anything to take over from HDMI becomes a winner is if its more reliable- HDMI is a dirty word for many installers- for many of us, we can tackle the technical problems here and there with no problem- but look no further than our current K players with HDMI. Many of us have difficulty making it work because of silly issues between hardware. Whatever happens, it needs to be truly plug and play.

http://www.displayport.org/

So with that in mind, I would hope that K gives us the latest connections- whether its HDMI or DP or something else.

Bottom line speculation is a fun sport for us, but there is much that can change between now and when we see something. I hope its early 2009- when the product is ready for us, Ill be right there in line, but for now, this is just a good discussion.

[Beoliving]

1080/24p is what is needed without any doubt for Blueray playback! I have aToshiba XE1 hooked up to my projector and with the recent update HD-DVD is just a pleasure, no judder any more.

SD-DVD is upscaled with 1080p/50Hz (PAL) from the same DVD player without any problem and very high picture quality (an external scaler like the VP50 Pro does an even better job).

I will have a home demo of the 1U server and the movie palyer 2, looking forward to see their scaling performance.

I also heard from sources close to the matter that 1TB drives are close to be released and I should not order any 750GB drives any more.

Karsten

[JerryL]

The scaling performance of the current player is pretty good- it will not do 1080P though- as again- I believe the current DVD rules say 1080i over HDMI is OK but not 1080p. Having an external scaler is usually the better way to go since they usually allow you to tweak the image etc. I am waiting on the Radiance. I think you will find the best picture from the current kaleidescape player either at 480p into a plasma or LCD or 480i into your current scaler. Forgetting the deinterlacing (which is very good) and the scaling (which is solid), the current K player produces a very clean and nice image off DVD.

best regards,
Jerry

[rgbyhkr]

Originally Posted by josh

Actually, I suspect they may be building such a transaction engine anyway. They're practically pre-announcing that they'll offer a content download service at some point, so they'll need the ability to bill their customers for content anyway. Adding in the billing of "managed copy license" purchases would be simple in that case.

--josh

If MMC does come with a fee, there has already been mention of online "clearing houses" used by the industry to collect the fees. Basically, the industry will setup a backend system online that all hardware manufacturers will have to make their products interface with to provide electronic payment and receive back authorization for using MMC for a given disk. That of course means that those devices will require internet access. Not a problem for the K system, but it will require K to design the interface to for customers to process payments. The smart move would be to do it in a way that is as minimally annoying as possible. So, maybe they let you enter CC info via the web ui or onscreen just once, and then offer selections for "auto-payment" on/off (wouldn't require you to confirm payment each and every time), etc.

Jeff

[JerryL]

Good points.