It’s time to declare that media servers for the home are a mature and fully viable technology. Any remaining minor quibbles are purely related to the proper management of intellectual property or copyright issues, but these can be sorted satisfactorily under modern licensing arrangements.

It is now perfectly feasible to have all your music, DVDs, and even Blu-ray movies centrally stored for replay, with an easy to use full-screen display of cover art to aid selection of what to play. For a number of years now the company accepted to be at the leading edge of this technology has been US based manufacturer Kaleidescape. Like all products at the leading edge of their technology, this product came at a considerable price. Recently Kaleidescape have recognised that not all clients required thousands of movies on their drive, nor did they necessarily need these to be distributed to various parts of their home – hence the release of the Cinema One system.

Kaleidescape's Cinema One, now selling for $6,999, is primarily a stand-alone Home Theatre and music system, although it can be expanded out with other components to do multi-room. As it comes, it is everything that you'd want in an A/V server. The interface is brilliant, the operation easy, and the storage system is a@robust and backed up (RAID system) to ensure no loss of material in the even that any of the multiple hard drives fails.

Organise your movies and music with the press of a button. Sort by title, actor, artist, director, genre, year of release or run time. The Kaleidescape Movie and Music Guide Service provides information which automatically organises and cross-references your library to help you rediscover and share favourites with family and friends. The high resolution cover art and beautiful onscreen display make it easy to choose the feature presentation immediately without trailers or advertisements.

The Cinema One stores up to 225 DVDs or 2500CDs on its disk cartridges. Content stored on a Cinema One is protected by RAID-K technology, which means that if one drive fails another has it backed up. Add a Blu-ray Vault and this system will also serve up your HD content, which makes it a truly exceptional system in today's marketplace.

With the Child Remote, when a child presses a button, the onscreen display switches to a simplified child user interface, which only displays the cover art for the movies that the parents have added to the Child collection. The rest of the content is hidden. Press a button on the main remote to go back to the full library.

The Cinema One will work with other Kaleidescape products so that you can expand your system and share content with any TV in the house.

The storage system is based around high-reliability hard drives, and is the most robust system we have worked with. It automatically documents and organizes your collection for you, and provides various ways for you to browse and select. You can do bookmarks and assemble favourite play lists for music or scenes from movies. There is no loss of quality – what you see and hear is an exact bit-for-bit copy of the original.

The Kaleidescape offering also extends way beyond a single room solution. By adding additional players you can distribute your movies and music to as many rooms as you like. The addition of a music server will allow up to four rooms of music only distribution and you can piggyback as many music servers as you like. The system can be expanded out to handle 3,600 DVD’s or 600 Blu-Ray movies. If you don’t have many (or any) movies you can order collections from Kaleidescape, with lists like ‘Critics 150’, ‘The New York Times Best DVD’s’, ‘Family Collection’, ‘Academy Award Winners – Best Pictures’, ‘Sports Collection’ etc.