I need a system that will store and catalog 400 CD's and DVD's with an onscreen selection menu. What's available?

Kenwood Soveriegn Entre' and DV-5900M or this [Link: mediaaccesssolutions.com]

Escient will be coming out with something in June

For a solution that won't cost thousands of dollars or even tens of thousands try the new Sony 301 disc changers. You can link more than one for more movie capacity. I use a program called DVD profiler to make a binder with all my movies and the slot number. Just pick a movie and dial in the slot number. There is also an on screen menu for selection. $499.00 Retail.

Maybe Escient can get it right this time. The powerplay was a disaster. Wait. I think I hear one crashing right now!

Brian

The escient system is a spin off of the fireball, will control JVC DF07 and kenwood dvd carousels. The fireball is fairly stable

Yeah, I heard about the new product. I like to offer my clients a DVD management system that is "Fairly" stable for 2 maybe 3 or is it 4 grand? Or is it more?

Is Escient going to replace all the bad powerplays and Runco SAR systems that I have seen? A lot of people are pissed that they paid 10K or more for a system that crashes or reboots itself everytime you try to use it. What a POS.

I have a Kenwood Entre and DV-5050M... and I love 'em!!!

The Escient Powerplay was always very stable for me. I never actually had to reboot the unit due to a crash, although I did have to reboot it in order to correct the slow screen redraw effect from their decision to use Windows 98... I did have a transport go down, but this was most likely an environmental issue. Control was via Crestron. I think it is too expensive for what it does.

I own the Sony DVD changer. It is pretty nice, but definitely has some flaws.
1) The screenshot resolution is really too low to browse your collection visually.
2) The unit's OSD is very slow and makes browsing this way very cumbersome. Knowing your disc title and slot numbers would be really helpfull with this unit.
3) No field search capability.
4) Of the 100 DVD titles that I loaded into it, about 7 came up with the data fields populated automatically. Granted that most of my DVDs are old, it was a pain to enter this data manually.

At the moment all we have to choose from are the extremes: A carousel changer, or a hard disk server. We demo'd the MAS DVD server at our office and were impressed by its instant access & searching capabilities, but it's still way too expensive - 400 DVD storage for $36k. But give it a few years, and this will be the only way to go, as it is now for CDs. With so many products to choose from and hard disks with 300GB capacity, there's just no reason to ever play music from the original CD anymore, for the same reason that no one runs software from a floppy or CDROM anymore.

In the meantime, the Sony DVD changers are by far the most user-friendly.

- Doug