S1Digital has released a new 100-disc carousel disc changer for Blu-ray that is special tailored for media center PCs. This USB 2.0 Blu-ray player holds a up to 100 discs, and can pull each disc up from its cataloging software. As each disc is loaded into the carousel the software locates case art and media and downloads them into your library. This allows for a text, genre or cover art searching for the movie you want to watch. Movies can be played at will, but Blu-ray video almost maxes out USB 2.0 bandwidth, unless S1Digital moves up to
USB 3.0.
Another ability this player brings is the ability to download the discs to a hard drive. Instead of leaving discs in the player, special software will rip the content to hard drive from which video can be played back. The best part is that the player can be loaded up, and told to rip your entire collection without intervention. That only works of course if your discs are DRM-less Blu-ray. Each disc can take up to an hour to load so you could fill and rip them all in about 4 days if you happen to have 3TB of storage handy. In 6 months that won't be much, but today that's still a little heavy. Also heavy is the price tag, $1500 to get this massive amount of Blu-ray content at hand.
Via eHomeUpgrade
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By Ian Chiu on February 9th, 2010
