Review: Kaleidescape Cinema One

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.

Kaleidescape

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.

The secret to this isn’t exactly Hollywood magic. Since the unit rips the entire disc to the hard drive all it’s really doing is playing back a local version of the same pristine 1080p video file found on the disc, only with modified Stop/Start cues. This approach lends this powerful movie server other fringe benefits too—like the ability to access special features and alternate audio tracks without messing with a disc menu. While this didn’t necessarily add anything to my disc library, it definitely took a lot away; namely, all the tedious crap that makes dealing with discs a pain in the first place.

Despite near flawless playback and performance, the discless utopia of the Cinema One is only half-realized. (Remember that huge catch?) Selling a device that copies and stores Blu-ray movies for playback is currently a little iffy, legally speaking. To stay out of hot water the Cinema One requires users to keep a physical copy of the Blu-ray in the player to allow playback of a ripped file. This isn’t a huge problem if you’ve already sprung for Kaleidescape’s 320-disc vault ($3,995), but for us mere mortals that’s a steep price to pay for well-appointed convenience.

Another option is buying digital copies of your movies straight from Kaleidescape’s middling digital movie store front (thus bypassing disc restrictions altogether). But that option should only appeal to diehard Kaleidescape users. (Fortunately, old-school DVDs don’t fall under the same restrictions—you can still rip that old Fight Club disc and replay it disc-free as much as you want on the Cinema One.)

As a whole, it’s hard to deny the appeal of the Cinema One. When it’s running at full tilt (i.e., already full of accessible movies), it’s easy to hop from film to film with hardly a pause. Seamless access like this was practically unthinkable in the bajillion-disc changer days, and paired with its admittedly cool interface it’s clear that the Cinema One is a step forward technologically. Unfortunately, with its hefty price tag and current licensing limitations, it also manages to take two steps back. I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise.