Has anyone got a Zappiti NAS 4K HDR SE? (1 Viewer)

[Carl David]

Thinking about digitising my disc collection and looking at the options available.

The Zappiti NAS looks like a decent piece of kit that is well made and functional.

Is there anyone who has one of these who can comment on if they are worth the purchase?

 

[Carl David]

They appear to be an impressive piece of kit.

The GUI looks slick and you can choose from different pictures for each specific movie stored on the device including different poster designs of the same movie.

The digital storage device duplicates a bit-for-bit copy of the original, including any DolbyVision or HDR info and that info is decoded by the player.

Therefore, digitising of the movie with minimal loss so disc quality reproduction of the movie instantly accessible from the device.

One particular review here:

Zappiti NAS Rip 4K HDR - HomeTheaterHifi.com

We’re home theater enthusiasts, and most of us have large collections of movies on DVD, Blu-ray and 4K UHD discs. We buy them; we play them; we store them.

hometheaterhifi.com

It is pricey, unfortunately.

A major feature of the product via their website is:

"The Zappiti NAS 4K HDR SE provides fail-safe storage for your collection using professional disk storage technology called RAID-5. If a drive fails, data is automatically restored to the hot spare disk, without loss of any content. The failed drive is replaced without turning off the server or disrupting playbacks in progress."

It looks as though the product is built to last too.

Zappiti NAS 4K HDR SE | Zappiti

Back-up your music and video library and enjoy them in every room of your home. Reliably store and protect from damage every bit of your movie and music collection with the touch of a button.

www.zappiti.com

Might be a perfect solution to storing a backup to any serious collector's library.

 

[Kyle_D]

Zappiti had to pull that device from sale in the U.S. for legal reasons.

 

[Carl David]

Zappiti had to pull that device from sale in the U.S. for legal reasons.

Do you know what the reasons were?

 

[Kyle_D]

Do you know what the reasons were?

It's illegal under the DMCA to sell a device that circumvents "technological protection measures," such as the AACS encryption used on Blu-ray discs. So far, the U.S. Copyright Office has refused to pass rules that would allow a DMCA exemption for backing up your own audiovisual media, although it has passed limited exemptions for some software and other fair uses.

 

[Carl David]

It's illegal under the DMCA to sell a device that circumvents "technological protection measures," such as the AACS encryption used on Blu-ray discs. So far, the U.S. Copyright Office has refused to pass rules that would allow a DMCA exemption for backing up your own audiovisual media, although it has passed limited exemptions for some software and other fair uses.

Do you think that law protects the movie studios at the expense of the public?

 

[Kyle_D]

Do you think that law protects the movie studios at the expense of the public?

That's getting into a political discussion that's not permitted under forum rules.

 

[Carl David]

That's getting into a political discussion that's not permitted under forum rules.

Fair enough.

A shame Americans can't buy that product as it looks to be an excellent solution.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

There are several long running threads on HTF about making your own HTPC / Plex server.

This is basically an expensive product that’s charging a premium price to do something that’s easily accomplished by using the free MakeMKV software to make lossless rips of your discs and the Plex software to stream those to your television.

These kind of projects can be very satisfying if you enjoy database management but they also are very time consuming, and depending on how many discs you have (and how much hard drive storage you need), very expensive.

I’d never want to discourage anyone from pursuing a project of interest to them, but fair warning, it’s not for the faint of heart. This isn’t the kind of thing to do if you merely want a backup copy of your discs. This is the kind of thing to do if you want to go from disc-based playback to having everything on a server available at a button touch.

I find my setup extremely useful for me. All of my discs have been ripped and can now be viewed on any TV in the house, while the discs themselves reside in storage in the attic, where they don’t take up valuable living space. I can also access my collection on the go, so if I’m at someone else’s home I can log in to my system and stream to their house. But it also took me a year to rip my entire collection and the hard drive costs for the amount of space the collection takes up were astronomical. If my concern had simply been that some discs might go bad, it would have been cheaper to replace bad discs as they were discovered than to do this.

 

[Carl David]

There are several long running threads on HTF about making your own HTPC / Plex server.

This is basically an expensive product that’s charging a premium price to do something that’s easily accomplished by using the free MakeMKV software to make lossless rips of your discs and the Plex software to stream those to your television.

These kind of projects can be very satisfying if you enjoy database management but they also are very time consuming, and depending on how many discs you have (and how much hard drive storage you need), very expensive.

I’d never want to discourage anyone from pursuing a project of interest to them, but fair warning, it’s not for the faint of heart.

Yes.

It's looking like a time consuming and financially expensive process whichever option is utilised.

It's unfortunate Zappiti and other products that can offer the same service are unable to sell their products in the USA.

I think with that potential big market it would help for any company to sell at a bigger scale and over time help bring prices down as the more wealthy customers buy the product at first release allowing for any company to recoup their big investment and permitting them to lower their price after healthy initial sales.

I will keep an an eye on the company to see how their prices and sales do in the future.

I hope they end up very successful as I think they are offering a very well made product where there is a market demand for it although perhaps not at the current price point.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

With respect, this is a niche project for a niche hobby. It always will be. The vast majority of American households have moved away from disc based playback. Most typical consumers don’t want to buy anything, whether it’s new equipment or new discs. They don’t want to create and maintain a database. They want to pay a flat fee to two or three subscription services and be done with it. There is an extremely limited number of people interested in maintaining home servers relative to the total number of consumers in the marketplace. And that’s totally fine. But this isn’t the kind of thing where a couple years from now, every household will have one. Home servers for movie content have been around a couple decades now, it’s really nothing new.

But if this seems like a project that’s interesting to you, I wish you luck and welcome you to the small club of us that do enjoy this

 

[Rob W]

Zappiti has a Canadian web store selling their products - can’t hurt to drop them a line and see if they’ll ship to the U.S. (although I suspect they can’t )