Ars has covered Kaleidescape many times over the past several years, most recently in March when the company was handed a defeat in its long-running court battle against the DVD Copy Control Association (CCA). (The company has since appealed the ruling.) Kaleidescape makes home theater machines—devices that can keep all of your DVD and Blu-ray movies in a single location and play them without the hassle of digging through DVD cases to find the right disc. The thing that sticks out about Kaleidescape is that its home theater boxes aren't small. These are typically enormous devices that cost many thousands of dollars, and the boxes are more likely to be installed by a home theater contractor than by a normal consumer.

Any self-respecting home theater geek these days likely already has a setup designed to do something similar. This usually takes the form of a home theater PC running XBMC or one of its variants, with video and music stored either on internal storage or connected to a NAS over Ethernet. Doing this will get you a system that does most of the things Kaleidescape's boxes do, but the DIY route comes with the added hassle of installing and maintaining your own software. You also need to acquire a working knowledge of disc ripping and encoding, a task that isn't terribly difficult but isn't terribly easy either.

Kaleidescape's systems automate a significant chunk of the HTPC experience, wrapping the movie ripping and storage aspect in a single attractive package that looks and functions more like an appliance than an HTPC. The company's traditional products, as mentioned, are expensive—like, $10,000-type expensive. They're great for an upmarket customer who wants to wire every room in his or her vacation home up for movie watching, but it's not a great option for the more middle-class among us.

The Cinema One is Kaleidescape's attempt at moving a bit down the market. The system still isn't anywhere near approaching "cheap," but it is significantly less expensive than previous Kaleidescape offerings. A Cinema One will set you back about $3,995.

Expense is relative, but that's still a heart-stopping chunk of change. For that amount of money, though, you get an awesome home theater system that stores hundreds of movies and can access hundreds more online. It's a great little box, but is it worth it?

That depends. Let's dive in.

Unboxing and physicality

The Cinema One arrived tucked away neatly inside its box, along with an accessory kit containing a very normal-looking infrared remote control with batteries, a power brick and cord, an Ethernet cable, an HDMI cable, and a tiny USB 802.11n Wi-Fi adapter. It's gratifying to see the cables and the Wi-Fi adapter already included. Considering the device's price, their absence would be inexcusable.

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

There's a large fold-out poster stuck atop the accessory kit showing how to get the system up and running quickly. This includes details on how to program the remote to control your television, receiver, and other things in your A/V stack.

The system is designed to look exactly like a DVD or Blu-ray player. Its dimensions mirror those of a typical player, and it has a pleasant clutter-free white plastic bezel with a disc slot, a light-up logo (which dims during movie playback), and a trio of buttons. Those buttons allow you to eject a disc, rip the disc's contents to your library, and power the system on and off.

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

The system's casing is metal and quite sturdy; the entire thing weighs about 10 lbs (4.6 kg). The port layout on the back of the unit is as pleasingly sparse as its front bezel—from left to right, there's a power plug, an HDMI port, analog audio output ports, a digital audio coax output port, a USB port (for the Wi-Fi dongle), a gigabit Ethernet port, and a small plug for connecting an additional infrared receiver.