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

Arlen Schweiger - Editor of Electronic House Magazine

Arlen writes about home technology installations and product news and reviews for electronichouse.com and Electronic House magazine.