Movies at Your Fingertips: The Home Theater Movie Server

When GHT Group was founded in 1989, a movie server was a dream straight out of the Jetsons. Our company was born out of a deep passion for the then-nascent concept of home theater, providing Laserdisc (bonus points if you remember those) rentals and, later, DVDs. With physical media, a server wasn't a simple concept to execute. While consumer electronics companies built some devices that could handle a few hundred discs in the DVD area, finding a movie and playing it was still a relatively clunky process. Fast-forwarding to 2024, we're in the streaming era, where virtually any video is accessible at the touch of a button. So, who needs a home theater movie server in Atlanta? Need might be too strong a word, but we have several compelling reasons why you might want one. Let’s explore the premier movie server available today, the Kaleidescape system. It's more than a server; it's a higher-level experience for those who love audio and video entertainment at the best possible quality.

SEE ALSO: Why Trust Your Home Theater Design to GHT Group?

True Lossless Quality

What is lossless quality, and why does it matter? First, it's important to understand the lossless encoding of audio and video and what streaming does. Lossless encoding means that the audio and video are encoded at a higher bitrate, capturing more detail in digital form. For audio, that means more depth, dynamics, and detail, where voices are heard in all their breathiness, subtle background noises are not lost, and a soundtrack can swing from near silence to a deafening explosion instantly. For video, it means more clarity and precision, reducing softness, noise, and banding, so no detail gets lost, whether it's a whisker on a cowboy's face or the intense color of the scenery behind him. 

You know you can already stream movies from various services in 4K video resolutions, HDR processing for color and contrast, and Dolby Atmos for immersive surround sound. But when you stream from popular services, the bitstream is often compressed in order to use the available network bandwidth efficiently. The result is that nuance and detail can be lost, and the expensive home theater audio and video equipment you have invested in don't deliver their full potential. With Kaleidescape, you can take full advantage of high-end theater components, as the movies and content are delivered at a bit rate up to ten times higher than typical streaming. The result is a more immersive cinematic experience you will see, hear, and feel. 

The Servers

Kaleidescape offers two models for movie server storage and delivery, the Terra Prime and the Terra Prime Solid State. The Terra Prime uses traditional spinning discs with ultra-high capacity, with the top 96 Terabyte model capable of storing up to 1600 4K movies. With 2.5 gigabyte ethernet (wired), it can download a 4K lossless movie in as little as eight minutes. Depending on the quality of the movie playback, the server can support playback from 5 to 10 simultaneous streams if you want players in other rooms outside your home theater. 

The Terra Prime Solid State uses SSD technology for even faster performance, with downloads averaging 4 minutes and supporting up to 25 playback streams. The Kaleidescape servers are also assembled in the USA with strict quality control, so these are video solutions that match the quality of your high-end home theater projector, screen, and audio system. 

The Players

The Kaleidescape Strato players are high-fidelity components designed to deliver a better-than-cinema aural and visual experience. They can playback at 100mpbs bitrates and frame rates up to 60 fps for fluid animation and flawless visual detail. The Strato S player includes a hard drive, so it can also stream to Strato C players. While you only need one player if you desire this level of quality only in the home theater, the Kaleidescape system is fully scalable, bringing a higher-quality watching experience to other rooms through the connected server and players. 

The Experience

Kaleidescape is more than a movie server; it’s also a store that delivers movies, concerts, and other entertainment in the highest possible quality, not just rivaling but exceeding the commercial cinema experience. It presents an intuitive, attractive user interface, where it’s simple to find something to watch by genre, actor, director, new release, and other criteria. High-resolution trailers and detailed movie information add to the experience, supplying the background information that helps convey the full story behind the production. 

The Kaleidescape experience is also geared for custom environments. That means the system can be integrated with smart functions like lighting, motorized or hidden screens, climate, and automated masking to adapt the screen to different movie formats. Kaleidescape even encodes things like credits and intermissions so you can create a traditional movie experience, such as navigation lights fading up for an intermission or when the credits roll. The result? An unmatched watching experience that no popular streaming app can reproduce. 

With over 11,000 titles available—including exclusives not available on Blu-Ray or streaming—you’ll never run out of things to watch on Kaleidescape. Are you ready for a next-level home theater experience? To learn more, contact us today or click the chat box below to connect quickly with one of our staff members. We look forward to working with you!