You know, we never thought that it was that big of a deal to change CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs by hand. Seriously, if you're too lazy to walk two feet to your entertainment center you probably didn't want to see
Air Bud: Seventh Inning Fetch that badly in the first place. On the other hand, we
are gadget fiends and part of us can see the logic in something like
Sony's 400-disc Mega Charger. Hell, if a Blu-ray player is good, one that holds 400 discs must be
400 times as good, right? Well, maybe. As far as players go, this guy does pretty well, according to the reviewer at
Electronic House. In fact, video quality was deemed "excellent" and on-screen navigation was a snap. And you can't find fault with any player that supports Gracenote (especially if you're going to store hundreds of discs in the thing). On the other hand, the lack of Netflix and DLNA integration, WiFi, or even memory for BD-Live functionality (you'll have to supply your own USB thumb drive, it seems) just might cramp your style. So what do you think? Do you have 400 Blu-ray discs? Think you ever will have 400 Blu-ray discs? Then hit the read link and check out the sordid tale for yourself.
posted September 2nd 2009 4:53PM
Thats what she said!!!!
Of course she said the 400-disc changer was big. Any sane person would.
Honestly, I would like it specifically if I *didn't* have 400 Blu-rays. Then you could just put in your whole collection, and never ever have to change a disk. It's when you have 401 and have to choose the one disk you want to see the least, that the thing starts to lose its usefulness.
If that is the case try taking "Air Bud: Seventh Inning Fetch" out of the collection and just throwing it away.
This isn't for those who only have 400 discs, it has RS-232 daisy chaining so you can buy 4 and put ALL of your discs down in the basement and distribute them throughout your whole home using an Escient and controlling it with Elan.
This isn't built for the people who have their gear 2 feet away, it's for those who have their gear 200 feet away and down 2 flights of stairs.
Sure but are there 1600 or even 400 bluray titles available.
/ end comic moment
It holds 400 discs, which also includes DVD, CD, and possibly SACD. So I could see someone filling this up as soon as they get it.
Do not want. How much is 400 BD discs anyway? $10,000?
Thats exactly what I thought when I read this. At $30 a pop, its $12,000. No thanks.
Plus are there 400 different titles out now?
Also,
Couldn't a person just build a tower with a bunch Tb drives as they need the storage versus having to have all these discs in a machine.
A server of the same size is bound to be able to hold more movies and other content.
Well it can probably hold DVDs and CDs too so...
@kjb434
This is not a piece of gear for techheads. It is for rich people with a ton of disposable income who will just buy everything again when 4320p comes around.
That's what people said when DVDs came out as well. I now have well over 1000 and I have, by no means, a large collection.
the number of 2tb HDDs that could fit in a server that size could probably contain every movie ever made back to at least the 70's.
@Grammar Police I cannot rank you highly enough for your explanation.
Well, some simple math; a 2TB drive can store about 40 BluRay discs (worst-case). Ten 2TB drives consumes 376.8 cubic cm of space, so you'd be looking at 3768 cubic cm to store 400 movies. Obviously the space consumed by the enclosure would add to this, so let's double it to be generous, and say 7536.
I can't find dimensions for this particular MegaChanger, but the DVP-CX995V (400-disc DVD megachanger) should be similar in size. It has a volume of 43,642 cubic cm.
So, yes, it *would* be far more space-efficient to rip the discs to a 10-drive storage array. If you consider re-encoding just the main-feature (DVD-9 sized, 7.3GiB, is sufficient to be visually lossless for 1080p compared to the original source), you could likely store 400 movies in two hard disks, which is rather small.
"DVD-9 sized, 7.3GiB, is sufficient to be visually lossless for 1080p compared to the original source."
Wait, how is 7.3 enough to be visually lossless for 1080p? I have some standard definition DVD main movie rips that take up 7.3 (Kingdom of Heaven DC for example). I think 25 or so is what a standard BD main feature takes up, isn't it?
@Goblin: If you have over 1000 DVDs, you do have a large collection. (Anticipating "No I don't", my retort is: "Yes you do.")
Popcorn Hour FTW
I don't think anybody buying this cares that you could rip the discs and/or re-encode them. This is for the high end AV crowd who argue over which $2000 dvd player looks the best.
@ Grammar police: Better compression doesn't always mean more lossy.
@iofthestorm
Yeah, and 7 gigs does not equal 1080p.
It is easily double-plus-good. Not quite sure about that 400-plus-good math going around though. Seems to shady to work.
i like the reference to 1984
They should make an offer so if you buy 400 blu-rays you get that thing for free.
Damn I don't even know anyone that has anywhere near 400 Blu-Ray discs....
I have 8...
Im well on my way.
I have 48 so far and have yet to pay full price for one. I also had like 65 hd-dvd's which I picked up from sites like inetvideo.com for like $2-3 a movie.
People have the wrong impression of blu-rays... Of course if you want a brand new blu-ray movie you will pay the $25-30 fee, but you can easily pick up some blu-ray classics for around $10 at Wal-Mart or Best Buy. I mean just the other day I picked up Cast Away, Robocop, Reservoir Dogs, Total Recall, Terminator, for like $10 bucks each.
I'd say this is only for true collectors and watchers...I prefer having my movies displayed kind of like a book in a library. Even if I had 400 blu-rays, I wouldn't buy this.
So this is just a huge replacement for a large hard drive or htpc.
400 discs * 25GB = 10,000GB = 10TB. That is larger than a "large" drive, specially if you want redundancy.
So spend about $1500 on 15 Tb drives. That isn't that horrible since you already invested $10,000 on the disc to begin with!
At least utilizing hard drives you can scale how much storage you need. You may hit that 200 disc mark and stay there for a long time.
Buy the 8-Bay Drobo. Fill it with 2TB drives (and then 4TB drives when they are available). This will give you 12.48 TB of usable space.
Lets be crazy and assume that every disc is 37.5GB (which is the average of a BD-25 & BD-50). That will give you 320 full blu-ray movies. Plus, you can access them from every room in the house if they are on a computer.
But as everyone else said... the people buying this don't need a techie solution. Sigh.
course, you can also throw your 300+ DVD collection in there with your 15 blu-rays...
Ugh, what year is this? Who's going to buy a giant appliance to hold physical media?
Physical media are superior to downloadable crap for several reasons, but this isn't one of them. Media servers have to be bulk-storage based (in other words, hard drives). Oh, wait, Sony and others screwed themselves and us on that with their ignorant and ineffectual DRM and paid-for legislation? Aw, too bad.
This is just clueless.
Things like this almost never have an auxiliary slot for just loading ONE disk. So your friend brings a movie and the thing becomes the opposite of convenient. Plus, there's usually some annoying interface for entering the titles of the movies you put in there. Oh, and it's ugly. It's ugly as all sin.
Did you read anything about this? It reserves slot 1 as a "Rental" slot for movies rentals or if your buddy brings a DVD over. It even has a rental button on the remote to move the carousel to slot 1. Also, it uses an internet connection to download the information about the inserted disk (from the pictures, it looks like it downloads cover art, title, director, lead role, and release year).
All-in-all, it seems like they've made a pretty decent interface for it. I wouldn't spend $1900 on it, but I like the feature set.
You got me. I didn't read it. But I did look at the picture and I stand by the "ugly" remark.
They will sell exactly 0 of these.
They will sell lots of these. It's not for typical home user.
People with large in home theaters are popular buyers for these devices that hide in a closet.
Yep, it's made by Sony so it probably costs 5X more than it should...
People said the same thing about DVD changers and that has been a nice bit of sale for them. Until I installed my XBMC solution, I had a couple of 400-disc mega changers controlled with a URC MX-3000. It was the easiest, most painless thing in the world and worked every time.
Tech is cool, but until more server frontends start thinking of W.A.F., then solutions like this will always sell.
-aedile-
p.s. - I find it hilarious that you guys are ripping on this as too expensive. Have you *seen* how much they sell Kaleidescape servers for? This is chump change.
I bet they sell 2.
I have 52 blu rays ( and 23 HD DVD) and all my friends already think I'm a freak! This thing would obviously not fit in my entertainment center, I had to put my Wii on top of the popcorn hour to fit my oppo blu in
imagine how big a 400 tape VHS changer would be.
Bigger than 100 Liams put together!!!!
get a 2TB 3.5 harddrive(around $180) and you can put all of those in a HTPC.
400 Blu-ray discs is closer to 20 TB
normal Blu-Ray discs are only 25gb, it's the dual layer ones that are 50gb i think.
> 400 Blu-ray discs is closer to 20 TB
If you are talking about disk storage then you don't have to go whole hog all at once. You can start with what is effectively a pint sized version of this thing. It won't need to be a blight in the middle of your living room and you can make the content available to any device you want. There are even cheap "consumer devices" that will tie into your Virtual Jukebox.
You can start with a 40 BD-ROM jukebox and work up from there as tech improves.
Consumer home servers and NAS devices can put you at 160 BD-ROMs (with more drives).
Also, your capacity is determined by storage used not by physical slots used so any DVDs are going to use a lot less space then they would in a physical BD jukebox. Your 40 BD-ROM jukebox becomes a 200+ DVD jukebox. (assuming all DVD9 disks and no compression).
A good jukebox should have been released a lot sooner.
The point isn't that you need a gadget that holds 400 discs, it's that you need a gadget and larger is than the one below it which doesn't hold your collection. Seeing as it's 400 or 1, and if your collection is of size 1...