Sony's VGP-XL1B2 200 DVD changer for HTPCs

Even though it won't look nearly as good sitting next to your HTPC than the Vaios it was designed to complement, you can now pick up the Sony VGP-XL1B2 200 DVD changer that had previously limited to an optional add-on for the company's XL1 and XL2 Media Center PCs (or Digital Living Systems, as Sony would prefer). The changer will work with any machine running Windows Media Center Edition 2005 Update Rollout 2, and is controllable through your system's FireWire port. Perhaps the best part of the $800 device is its ability to daisy-chain with up to four more of its mates, giving you 1000 excuses to be like us and stay home every Friday night.

[Via Digital Media Thoughts]

[CiXel @ Mar 24th 2006 11:38PM]

I'm just really annoyed these changers only hold 200 discs. I mean Sony's own carosels hold 400 discs. The mechanisms can't be all that different, it's basically the tray that determines how many discs. For $800 no less... Guess I'll be holding onto my daisy-chained Pioneers a little longer. . .

[Louis @ Mar 25th 2006 12:13AM]

This is lame. In an age of iPods and XServes you would think Sony would see the potential of putting two 500GB sata drives into an enclosure with a DVD drive and make it a (lightly compressed) 500 DVD changer. Or 4 drives and make it a 1,000 DVD changer.

Perhaps we'll have to wait for Apple to show everyone how HDs + CPUs and a little bit of ram can magically transform old mechanical data retrieval systems, like CD players, into iPods.

[Terry @ Mar 25th 2006 12:28AM]

For a few extra bucks, change that DVD-ROM to a DVD-RW and have it do backups as well.

[Nuggetbro @ Mar 25th 2006 12:54AM]

Sony always makes pretty looking stuff but with days of the new DVR'S comeing out wiht things like 2-3 TB of HDD space who is going to want to use media anymore. Maybe a nice big fat Viao NAS would have been a better deal.

[Brian Binnerup @ Mar 25th 2006 1:33AM]

#3 - The unit already holds a DVD-RW drive.

[Jay @ Mar 25th 2006 4:37AM]

Yeah Louis. Apple will show us how it's done after many other companies do the same thing first, Apple takes the idea, dumbs it down, markets it till it's annoying, and then preys on the ignorant consumers.

[Camperton @ Mar 25th 2006 4:44AM]

Screw this piece of junk. Why can't Sony release a microscopic chip that implants in my brain and holds 2000 movies and beams in new releases onto my minds eye. Why? Why? Why?

[Darren Tilley @ Mar 25th 2006 5:14AM]

There are quite a few areas where this device exceeds my expectations.

1. I never expected to be able to daisy-chain 5 of them together.
2. I didn't expect it to be a burner. Thought it would only be a playback device.
3. I didn't expect it to be much under $1000. You can currently get it off Amazon for less than $700 (with $100 Mail in Rebate)

I think this is a great device. And the Media Center "My DVDs" feature really works great with these new DVD changers. At approximately 4GB per ripped DVD movie (without special features) it would take the majority of a 1TB HDD to compare to this. And if you include special features, it's gonna fill twice that. And that's not even considering the hassle of ripping all you disks.

I really don't understand the criticisms.

[Carl @ Mar 25th 2006 6:58AM]

#1: Because to rip the DVDs to a harddisk they would have to break their own copy protection on the DVDs. Which isn't going to look good at all, especially in any court case against 3rd party copiers/pirates.

[Mandrill @ Mar 25th 2006 7:06AM]

Does this device support "mass-transferring" of DVDs to a HDD?

I'm thinking of a situation several years from now: You have hundreds/thousands of non-DRM DVDs and you want to transfer all of them to HDDs or holographic discs. Instead of manually inserting each DVD to your DVD-RW drive in your PC, maybe this or similar devices will be able to do the trick for you? You'd only have to insert the n amount of DVDs to the changer, press 'transfer' and sit back.

[Jamie @ Mar 25th 2006 7:08AM]

For a LEGAL approach i.e. not ripping to disk, then it appears to be a good approach for working with MCE.

[inheritance @ Mar 25th 2006 7:55AM]

Actually I also think this is a fair price - one cannot argue that compared to harddrive storage, this is big (it's huge), ugly, noisy and very limited, but compared to having your kids destroy your DVD's, it's great.

I've ordered one to be able to support it in "My Movies", at the prices until now it has not been interesting, but I think this is a fair price.

If not anything else, it makes a great way of getting your DVD's stored on harddrives, 200 of them at a time.

[Russ Johnson @ Mar 25th 2006 8:52AM]

Will these changers and the My DVD features only work locally to the HTPC or will they work with with MCE Extender?

Because $800 for a DVD changer that's only plays DVD's to the server in my basement is ridculous. (Not that $800 for the changer alone is)

[the godfather @ Mar 25th 2006 8:58AM]

Lets say you rip 200 dvd's to your hdd at 4 gb a movie. This is also assuming you are shrinking them to 4gb as most movies use dual layer. So now you need 800gb, which will put you around 360$ (2 400gb drives). Not only will it take you a long time to rip all of these friggin movies (god forbid you decide to encode all of these with some format too), but then if one of these drives takes a dump, you lose all of your time and money. This is a decent product that saves time and is legal. So what if its huge and noisy? Hide it behind a cabinet or something where you cant hear/see it and the noise is blocked.

[ssmug @ Mar 25th 2006 9:48AM]

See, I think this would be useful to batch rip my cd collection to my HDD 200 CDs at a time. Given the size of my collection, I'd pay the $700 not to have to rip them one at a time by hand.

[thuff @ Mar 26th 2006 6:38AM]

#14 "but then if one of these drives takes a dump"

add a third drive and go raid 5. problem solved.

[Josh @ Mar 26th 2006 9:11AM]

Let's see, $289 for a Sony DVPCX995V 400-Disc DVD Mega Changer/Player from Amazon. And that includes a progressive scan DVD player in the box. This 200 disc changer from Sony doesn't include the DVD player hardware. No video output. No MPEG2 hardware. So why on earth is it $800? It should be much less expensive than the $289 model.

[E71 @ Mar 26th 2006 9:56AM]

At this point it would be a waste of money for me to purchase it. I'd rather wait for them to adjust it for blu-ray support. 200 BR Discs Mmm.

[HD lottery @ Mar 26th 2006 11:00AM]

Sorry but I'd rather have my DVD's on in a changer than stored on some huge HD array. 1st I don't want to pay the electric bill to keep all the HD's running. Second if something happens, IE power supply goes wonky or some electrical problems and all (some) of your HD(s) toast or your "all mighty" ATA drives start to crap out like they always do in 1-2 years. ALL of your movies are wiped away... 3rd I've been doing movies on HD for 5+ years and I gave away my exyternal array to a friend, it's just a new FAD to the newbies into digital video...

**key note here**
Until we have a affordable consumer backup solution for data systems this large it's just a geek factor putting the movies on a HD and playing them... been there, done that before... I'll keep the dvd disc(s) in a Kenwood multiple changer(s) for now.

And storing HD on your magnetic disks will be loads of fun... lol

I assume so many of you really need the movie to startup 10 seconds quicker than my changer, and need to stream to multiple rooms simultaneously?!? lol, ya that justifies the huge array for the movies...

[glacia00 @ Mar 26th 2006 1:07PM]

I have to agree with HD lottery on this. I did the movies on HD thing until I lost a drive with a big chunk of my movies on it and the other drives felt like a time bombs waiting to blow.

Holographic or some other technology will solve this problem in the future but for now movie storage other than a disc unfortunately just isn't there yet.

[Your Mom @ Mar 26th 2006 4:29PM]

So does this device show up as 200 individual optical drives in My Computer? Or is it only supported in the MCE interface? Would it be useful for something other than playing DVD video discs? It would be nice if there was a driver for it that made it useable in other apps. Particularly for mass ripping CDs (it is taking me forever to re-rip my entire CD collection in Apple Lossless) or for holding a whole collection of games and not having to dig out the disc everytime you want to fire up a different game.

[Craig @ Mar 26th 2006 5:45PM]

"it is taking me forever to re-rip my entire CD collection in Apple Lossless"

talk about a colossal waste of time. just wait until the iPod isn't king-sh*t anymore. i love the iPod, but why would you rip to Apple's proprietary format? i guarantee you'll have to do it all again in a few years.

[ChrisXS @ Mar 27th 2006 12:21AM]

Well technically, "Your Mom" won't ever have to re-rip again since she has it in a lossless format. Changing to another codec should be cake with some batch utilities.

[Cliff @ Apr 3rd 2006 10:37AM]

I can not comment on the performance or quality because I have not bought the item yet. However, Sony seems to be the best for several very important reasons; it is has the same disk capacity as any other fire-wire capable CD/DVD library on the market , it reads and writes, it can be daisy chained and best of all it cost about $2,000 less than it closest competitor. I have been waiting for a reasonable price device since the release of MCE 2005 SP2. Thank you Sony!

[Brian Binnerup @ Apr 4th 2006 9:22AM]

Cliff: Actually, the unit is an OEM'ed PowerFile, as is the Niveus Ice Vault unit, so all in all the quality of these units and functionality of them will match the mutch higer priced PowerFile's.

Given that fact, $799 is a great price!

I still this a huge NAS is a lot nicer though, the unit is simply way to big to fit in a livingroom.

Regards,

Brian

[Otis Wildflower @ Aug 22nd 2006 12:11PM]

If I can find linux drivers for this, it would be a fscking godsend. This thing is meant to be hooked to a HTPC, so playback is redundant. Has anyone dissing this device actually USED a sony DVD megachanger lately? News flash: THEY SUCK. The interface is slow, ugly, and they haven't yet figured out how to read title and art off of DVDs to prepopulate the catalog!

Using Myth as a frontend that can "cddb"-ize loaded DVDs would be a huge fscking win.

Also, it's a burner, so it's another huge win for SOHO backup management (if you can get proper changer drivers over firewire).

Nope, this is actually what I'm looking for, assuming of course that there's linux or OS X support.