This from the Feb. 08 Issue of CEPro

This from our favorite magazine CEPro.

Escient Offers First Video Server The Vision VS servers are the first Escient media managers to support DVD ripping. They also accommodate up to four external DVD changers. Of course it goes without saying that Foss-AVI offers the entire line of Escient Products. We featured these at the recent Home Show and they performed flawlessly, just as they will in your home.

Escient has finally added DVD storage to its line of media servers. In the past, the company — which pioneered CD music streaming — stuck to legally safe ground by managing DVD collections in a disc changer, but not supporting DVD ripping. That changed during the CEDIA Expo, when the company debuted an entirely new media management solution that allows users to rip both CDs and DVDs onto a hard drive and deliver the content to remote rooms of the house. “We’re taking the leap,” says Escient GM Bill Carson. “It builds on the core Fireball middleware developed over the last five years.” Fireball is Escient’s flagship brand of hard-drive media servers. The series, called Vision, is anchored by the VS-100 and VS-200 integrated servers/players. They offer 500 GB and 1 TB of storage, respectively — both with RAID 1 redundancy. The units have four HDMI inputs for connecting compatible DVD changers, and there is a switcher built in. Another product in the Vision line is the VC-1 , a networked A/V zone player that acts as a client to stream content from VS servers to remote rooms. Rounding out the line is a large capacity media server called the VX-600, featuring four 1 TB drives in a RAID 5 configuration and unlimited expandability. The VX-600 provides advanced early detection monitoring systems. “It’s monitoring the system all the time,” says Carson. If a drive is on the brink of failure, the system could alert the integrator. ■ —Julie Jacobson