09.02.2008 — Escient has a few clarifications on the release of its new Vision media series.

In our last Vision story, we were amused that Escient called its first shipping Vision server a fifth-generation product. Per the company's PR firm, we confirmed that the fifth-gen products "do everything they were said to do when they were first announced" one year ago at CEDIA.

But Escient product manager Marty Wachter wants to point out that Vision is "Escient’s fifth generation product line in almost 12 years." (Apparently the "V" in Vision stands for the Roman-numeral five.)

The first four generations were the TuneBase/Pro, TuneBase 100, PowerPlay and Fireball.

Wachter explains that the "all new interface" refers to "Vision’s user interface in general, compared to all previous products."

As for product features, Wachter notes that, when Vision was first announced at CEDIA in 2007, it did not allow direct importing of encrypted DVDs.

"At CES in January 2008 we announced that Vision will in fact support direct import of encrypted DVDs maintaining all of the DVD’s original content and CSS encryption," Wachter says. "Vision also applies the extra step of further encrypting the copy on the Vision hard drive so that if in the unlikely event that someone were to hack it, they still can’t copy the DVD’s off the drive and play or distribute them."

Wachter goes on to say that any Vision client (VC and VS models) can connect to four Vision servers at a time. These servers can be VS (the all-in-one model) or VX NAS storage devices.

As a reminder, you cannot use generic NAS storage with Vision. "This is because we have developed specialized software that runs on our VX NAS that allows multiple servers to interoperate together on the network for content sharing, editing, and merged browsing," Wachter says.

The VS and VX product provide Escient Early Detection Monitoring System to warn the dealer and Escient about possible hard drive problems before they occur. The VC-1 doesn’t have a hard drive in it, so it can’t share any music with anything else. It is strictly a client.

Wachter also wants to point out that the Fireball update will allow Fireball to see Vision music and for Vision to see Fireball music, but photos and movies are not shared between Fireball and Vision.

Escient is in booth #100 at the CEDIA Expo 2008.

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