Kaleidescape Helps Homeowner Wade Through 1200 Disc Collection
By Lisa Montgomery
A Crestron control system and Runco projector help user enjoy his massive movie hoard.

With the advent of video streaming, many people have packed away their DVD collections for good, pulling movies instead from online services like Netflix and Hulu. Not the owner of this fully automated home. He’s an avid DVD collector, and he uses the somewhat outdated media as his main source of entertainment content.

Already topping out at somewhere near 1,200 discs, his collection is far from complete. “I’d say we buy 70 percent of the new movies that come out,” he says. He and his wife aren’t picky about what they watch, either. “We have everything from early Cary Grant and John Wayne movies to the latest Harry Potter releases. We have every decade covered.”



Digital Storage = Tidy Theater
At this rate, you’d expect the shelves of his media room to be jammed with an unruly assortment of DVD cases. But this recently built home theater couldn’t be tidier. Not a single DVD is in sight. That’s because they have been stored digitally on a Kaleidescape media server ($26,995). It reads the disc, places it in the correct category- action, comedy or drama- and stores it digitally on a 24-terabyte hard drive system.

To retrieve the stored content, they use a Wi-Fi enabled, 8-inch Crestron touchpanel (around $2,000), with a menu designed and programmed by the custom electronics (CE) pros at Home Entertainment Expo in Sudbury, Mass.

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