6:09
Did you know that there's a secret Netflix for millionaires? Well, there is. And it offers up uncompromising image quality. Yes, even better than 4K Blu-ray. A large library of AAA films and TV series, not to mention endorsements from filmmakers that you might have heard of like uh Martin Scorsesei, Ben Affleck, and Josh Gad. And the craziest part of this is that it's not actually new. Since 2001, Collidescape has gone from offering a semi-official way of digitizing your disc library to securing not just movie streaming, but movie downloading rights from notoriously protective studios like Disney, Paramount, Warner Brothers, and more. This required them to build and maintain an encryption scheme for these files that is unbreakable.
Unbreakable. And it's not for a lack of trying because the quality of these files is like nothing that I've ever seen or heard before. Collidescape focuses most of their marketing on comparing their bit rate to streaming services, but the highest tier cinematic 4K or 8K goes far beyond any other consumer accessible format, making this the closest thing to bringing the master copy right to your home screen. So, how do they do it? Well, for starters, you cannot watch Collidescape content on just any smart TV or computer, and certainly not on a cell phone. You will need one of their proprietary player boxes. And oh, what's that? You want to store more than just 7 to 10 films on
it? Well, now you're going to need one of their proprietary storage boxes for thousands of dollars. Wait, you wanted to actually watch or rent any movies? You'll be buying them one by one at rates as high as $45 per title. And did I even mention yet that after the investment you've made so far, you still don't own a remote control? Nope. In classic top-of-the-line fashion, there's not so much as free bread, never mind a free lunch. So, the question is, can the experience possibly somehow justify the somewhat janky user interface and the unfriendly pricing?
Well, the only way to know is to watch on and sit through this segue to our sponsor, Yo Green. Solve the limited storage size and file transfer speed woes of yestery year with a DXP 6800 Ultra 6BY NAS. Thanks to over 200 tab of expandable storage, you and your team can have a central hub for everything you need. Learn more with our link below. It's worth noting before we begin that I am well aware of digital piracy, but that is not the subject of the video today, and I'm only going to be comparing the Kaleidoscape with other legitimate means of obtaining media. With that out of the way, my first
impressions of the Strato K movie player that Collidescape let me for a few months were not good. Oh, there were good things. uh boards built in Canada with assembly in the US. That's pretty sweet. And I appreciated the simple effect of packaging. But if the included Audioqu Quest HDMI cable was supposed to instill confidence, it actually had the opposite effect. My eyes just about rolled completely out of their sockets onto the floor when I read the blurb about the importance of installing the cable in the right direction for the long grain copper strands. And when I fired up the Collides Escape interface for the first time, I almost wished my eyes had fallen out. Hello, 1990s Final
Fantasy called and they want their default textbox format back. Also, if I wanted my serial number that bad, I'd look at the back of the player. It's right there. But then it hit me. None of that matters because nobody is buying a multi,000 streaming box and setting it up themselves. I'm a weird freak anomaly. it's the installer who's going to be dealing with all of this. And then suddenly I started to actually appreciate the no BS approach to the user interface. I even appreciate that Collides Escape cares enough about the user experience to just say no to Wi-Fi. It's wired only, baby. Gigabit only, which doesn't feel very forward thinking in 2026. But still, that's going to provide a way more consistent experience
when you're trying to download 100 GB plus movies compared to Wi-Fi. So, I got everything set up the way that my local AV Pro would settle back on the couch and remembered that I still don't have a remote. The Strato Case supports CEC, so I should be able to pass through my TV's remote controls, but my weird China only TV model is a little weird. Oh my god, you need a phone number. Do I have to like WeChat login? So, I settled instead for the remote tab in their app. It's fine, I guess. You go to the remote tab, select your player here.
I assume since you're wealthy enough to have a $5,000 Android box, then you probably have several on your yacht. Then, it's off to the races. The main two tabs are going to be movies, where you have content that is actually downloaded to your player and/or purchased on your account, as well as store, where you can obtain more. It mostly runs pretty smoothly, though, I did encounter these weird glitches once in a while. Like, what the heck is this thing where the home and back buttons from Android show up? So, basically, if you select anything and then go to the left, it's like, here's your default Android navigation icons. But in spite of the occasional jank and the ugly white text on blue background thing
they've got going on here, the interface has some pretty cool ideas. Like if you go to explore and then select say a director or an actor, I chose Robin Williams. You get this cool tile interface here that can be scrolled in any direction that you like. I could certainly see how an alphabetical list would be a little bit more pragmatic, but this is fun and pretty and you know what? Sue me. I like it. That is until I try to find a TV show. Which seasons of South Park are these ones? I have to either click through or highlight each one at a time and then wait for it to pop up. Is this a champagne problem? Yes. but it does make buying an entire TV series a bit tedious. So clearly the interface is designed around movies first with TV
seasons as an afterthought. Another thing that annoyed me is that when I navigated to Aladdin either on the web store or in the browse tab, I was presented with the option to buy a two movie set, the liveaction and the one that you should actually watch for $30. The pricing's actually been updated, but my point remains. If I navigate to Aladdin through the remote interface on the player, I'm not presented with the same combo deal. Another random annoyance. No scrubbing. Really, guys? I got a chapter skip or do this janky 4x playback thing. What year is it? I'm sure that feels like nitpicking to some of you. I mean, as long as they had the film that you wanted. Did anybody really
complain that the shelves at Blockbuster weren't aesthetic enough or that you had to rewind the movie? Watching movies is supposed to be about the movies. And there, Kaleidoscape delivers very well. The library of titles available on their service, it's not comprehensive. Many of A24's films are absent, for example, but there is a lot to watch and much of it at way more reasonable prices than you might think given the cost of the hardware. A 4K rental of Superb Bad and either HDR10 or Dolby Vision with dozens of extras for $8. Now that's a movie night. And their comprehensive tagging system integrating common sense age ratings as well as Rotten Tomato scores
makes it quicker to drill down into something that everyone wants to watch. And then wait around for it to download. I know I said that it's uh Netflix for millionaires or whatever, but unlike Netflix, Collidescape is not actually a streaming service. And they go to great lengths to explain in normie terms what that means and the difference that higher bit rate makes to the viewing experience. And it really does. That copy of Superb Bad is noticeably sharper with less color banding and fewer compression artifacts than what you would get from any streaming service. And I haven't even gotten to the best part yet. Collidescape's real differentiator, in my opinion, is not the regular 4K films, cuz I could get
the same experience from a 4K Blu-ray for, in many cases, a fraction of the price. Rather, it's their 4K cinematic format. While the Blu-ray of Top Gun Maverick, for instance, lands in the 60 to 70 megabit per second range with peaks that are above 100 megabit, 4K cinematic breaks the 100 megabit barrier on average, with some HDR10 films even featuring 444 chroma. That means that unless you somehow have access to the original master of a film, there is no other version anywhere that comes even close to the bit rate of 4K cinematic. And while there is absolutely a point of diminishing returns, the Strato 4K is the closest that I've ever been to having fighter jets inside my house. Like, I can't say enough about
how good it looks. It's the cleanest image quality that I've ever seen in any context ever, but somehow not in like an over smoothed or in like a processed way. It manages to be the best of both digital recording and a classic filmic look. Like um film grain is one of those things that can look good in the right context. It's just that the right context is often an analog system. In digital systems with compression, it often just drags down the perceived image quality. But here, we've got enough bit rate and we've got enough resolution that I just don't feel that way anymore. To be clear, I'm not saying that this is for everyone. To even begin to get any benefit from it, you're going to need a 100in screen or more with very good HDR
performance. I mean, there's a reason that Marine is listed before home theater in their drop down menu. These guys know who their customers are. And, and this is maybe even a more important point, even on the right screen on a big enough screen, most people wouldn't notice. And even if they did, probably wouldn't care. Compared to a 4K Blu-ray of the same film or even a regular Blu-ray, the vast majority of people would not be able to pick the higher bit rate file. And there is no benefit on the audio side. In fact, not only do they use the same lossless audio formats that you'd get on a 4K Blu-ray, but I was pretty disappointed to find that Kaleidoscape often does not offer any
non-English audio tracks. But if you're a big image quality dork, you're going to be blown away by little things like the way that light looks. There's just no banding. Even in the most gradual of gradients, like the hanger shots at like 5 minutes into Top Gun, they look so freaking natural that I felt more like I was looking through a window. It's the kind of experience that you see and you just want to share with someone. I actually organized a movie night with the writing team and uh they had some thoughts. Last night we watched Sinners on the Strato Kaleidoscape. It was in their 4K cinematic. What did you think of 4K cinematic?
I think 4K cinematic is probably the reason to get the Strato. I feel like my baseline was so blown out of the water by Lionus's theater room cuz I've only been in there a couple times. So, I'm not sure exactly. But what I can say is it was unbelievable. Like the contrast in some of the shots was wild. Especially I said it right away when we turned on Sinners because we looked at a few like scenes in other movies before and it was super impressive. Um but sinners specifically it came on and there was this shot of like the moon and the sky and a tree in the foreground and I was immediately like this bangs slaps.
Okay. Well, we also tried to watch uh Pirates of the Caribbean the Black Pearl. Do you think 4K cinematic helped or harmed that movie? Pirates looked like ass. We either didn't have the right file or that file type and HDR and a great TV just revealed how bad that movie looks 20 years on. At what price point would you buy a Strato K player at? I mean, considering I won't spend the money on like a PlayStation instead of just my PC for like the seamless experience, I guess 500 bucks probably.
Yeah, I kind of agree cuz you have to pay for each movie afterwards, too, which adds expensive. They're like We were looking at them and they were like 2530 bucks a pop and then only some of them you can rent for like eight bucks. Yeah. And that's Canadian, too. How much is 4K cinematic worth to you? Honestly, you have to rent or buy it from them anyway, so give me that box for free. I completely agree. Thanks, James. In summary, it's pretty freaking nice. But there's a big difference between pretty freaking nice and pretty freaking nice that I would actually pay for. And this is where I got to snap back to
reality a little bit. First up, not every film is going to benefit from this experience. I'm not spending $40 US on Supergirl in cinematic 4K. Not to mention that there are entire genres that aren't going to benefit as much from the extra bit rate like animation. Which raises the question then, are there even enough worthy movies every year to justify something like this? Well, that's a question you're going to have to answer for yourself. But for me, it's a no. Especially when you factor in that you're missing out on the experience of, you know, getting out of the house and seeing a hot new film
while everybody's still talking about it. As it is, Belair Cinema is the only company that offers currentr run movies in your home cinema, and they are even more expensive in kaleidoscape with an if you have to ask, you can't afford it model. So, it's not really a fair comparison. My last major issue is around the ownership of any movies that I acquire through the service. See, while Collidescape does exist today and actually has a pretty long history now, even maintaining partnerships with the major studios throughout the great streaming service fracturing, there's no guarantee that they're going to continue forever. And with strong encryption and proprietary players comes encrypted
files that I can't play if the status quo ever changes. With that said, there doesn't seem to be a successor format to 4K Blu-ray on the horizon. And as we continue our march towards a future where physical media is well and truly dead, if this is the only way that we're going to get better than Netflix quality in the future, then I guess I'm rooting for them. And I hope that the team there can find enough success to eventually make the uh the hardware maybe a little more accessible in the future. Cuz even though I wouldn't personally buy one, are you sure about that? At least not right now. I got to respect a product and a company that is so focused on one experience. Kaleidoscape, to their credit, doesn't try to be
anything that they're not. No creepy algorithm, no obtrusive ads, no cross-ell with their flat rate shipping service for wet wipes or whatever. You buy or you rent movies, you download them, and you play them. Now, I'm gonna play the segue to our sponsor, UG, Green. Whatever tortoise said slow and steady wins the race, clearly never got their hands on a UG Green DXP 6800 Ultra N. Because I assure you, waiting over an hour for a 4K video to load from the cloud isn't winning any medals. The DXP 6800 Ultra is able to speed things up thanks to an Intel Core 5 processor and dual 10 gig Ethernet ports for rapid and direct access to your files. You're going to get an amount of storage ASOP couldn't ever fathom thanks to six SATA
bays and two MVME slots for up to 28 terabytes of storage. If you're using the NAS for a business, you're also going to cut down on the hodge podgey because the files are kept centralized. You can still create individual accounts and level of access though, so users only access what they need. You can also create backups to major cloud platforms and recover data in RAID 01 56 and 10 modes. And it supports VMs and Docker environments for extra security. You don't want to sleep on this one. Grab your UG Green DXP 6800 Ultra with our link today. If you guys enjoyed this video, why not check out the ultimate TV to watch Kaleidoscape on? Sony's new 4K
115inch true RGB TV offers up an otherworldly viewing experience for the low price of just $31,000 of dollars. What? That's pretty low if you spend five grand on your streaming
