Kaleidescape Server to Support Blu-ray in 2009

By Filip Brajovic | February 7th, 2008 - 5,639 Views

They’re at it again – Kaleidescape, a media server manufacturer, has set their sights on offering a media server that will hopefully be able to rip Blu-ray discs in 2009. Some might remember how Kaleidescape got into a court battle last year with the DVD Copy Control Association over one of their servers’ ability to rip DVD’s. Now, Kaleidescape has a new Blu-ray enabled device that could possibly support ripping of Blu-ray discs (via CEPro).

All the new info comes from an official post on the Kaleidescape Owners’ Forum, where an administrator has “received permission from Kaleidescape’s executive team to be the first to publicly post this information on the web.” The info affirms that a new Blu-ray compatible player will be released, which will be compatible with all Kaleidescape’s current models as well, giving current users peace of mind against their previous purchases of Kaleidescape models being in vain. The company is also hopeful that their unit will cost about as much as their current Movie Player 2 unit (pictured), however nothing is certain at this point. Apart from optical media, the device should be able to support web content, however no details are available yet. While the player will support the MPEG-2 format the current players use on top of H.264 and VC-1 codecs, there are no plans to have the player support HD-DVD.

However, the most interesting feature is the possible Blu-Ray ripping capability. Seems like this time around though, Kaleidescape is playing it safe and may allow studios to charge users to rip Blu-ray discs. The device is also supposed to deliver a massive amount of parallel Blu-ray playback; Kaleidescope is expecting the unit to be able to deliver 5 Blu-ray playbacks at once without sweating and up to 10 or 20 with performance tweaks over a gigabit ethernet network.

Regardless of how the Blu-ray ripping issue is resolved, the unit looks to be a great step into the future for Kaleidescape, adding features to a new unit while not neglecting its past users. The details of the whole Blu-ray ripping situation are shaky at best, most likely indicating that no agreement has been reached just yet. If all goes as planned though, Kaleidescape should have a powerful new unit without needing a powerful new arsenal of lawyers to dig it out of media copying lawsuits.