Kaleidescape’s Blu-ray player is expected to cost around the same as its MoviePlayer2
Good news for fans of the Kaleidescape media servers and Blu-ray format backers. The company will support playback of Blu-ray discs with a new player to be introduced in 2009, and is “optimistic” that it will allow for importing of Blu-ray discs as well.
From details released on the Kaleidescape Owners’ Forum (check out the whole thread here), given to an administrator by company executives, among the highlights are the new player’s compatibility with Blu-ray discs, DVDs and CDs and content from other sources (theoretically the Internet, though no Kaleidescape isn’t announcing any details about that).
Technically, the player will be compatible with all existing Kaleidescape servers and will support H.264 and VC-1 codecs in addition to the MPEG-2 that Kaleidescape uses now for DVD content.
Being able to rip your Blu-ray discs to one of Kaleidescape’s servers will need to be hatched out because of the Managed Copy protecting BD content, and the forum administrator also notes that studios might want to charge a fee to copy discs to their server.
It was also noted that there are no plans to include HD DVD support, except that Kaleidescape “reserves the right to revisit that decision based on traction in the marketplace.”
Of course, it’ll be interesting to see how big the Blu-ray catalog is by 2009, since the Kaleidescape servers really are ideal for people with mammoth DVD collections.
Via: CE Pro
No doubt they’ve been getting heat from customers who don’t want to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a system that can only import and play back standard 480p DVD discs!
Their response? An ambiguous announcement about Blu-Ray support, and a promise to deliver it sometime in “2009.” This announcement sounds like a lot of FUD to me.
Just another piece of news about someone willing to support Blu-ray but excluding HD-DVD as we keep seeing weekly after the Warner announcement.
Doesn’t the Axonix Media Server/player already store and playback BluRay AND HDDVD AND Internet?.
It almost feels like old news.
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Danm- Make my Home Theater System pretty crappy. I have a 46 inch LCD Samsung… 
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This is definately old news the Lewis MS Series can store and play back Blu-Ray movies including access to all the menus as the original disc