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The Short Form
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| $10,990 (as tested) / FUSIONRD.COM / 925-217-1233 |
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Snapshot
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| A great-looking user interface and unlimited storage options distinguish this movie and music server |
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Plus
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| • Integrates with third-party network-attached storage • Interface displays high-rez cover art and is customizable per zone • Affordable compared with other options |
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Minus
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| • No simultaneous A/V output • Limited music-playback options |
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Key Features
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• Genesis server’s 1-terabyte drive holds 150 DVDs or 1,600 uncompressed CDs • Up to three Cinema Players can be connected to create four simultaneous A/V streams • Genesis ($7,995): Outputs: HDMI, DVI, VGA, component- and S-video; coaxial and optical digital and mini-jack analog audio; 3½ x 17 x 17¾ in; 25 lb • Cinema Player ($2,995): Outputs: HDMI, component video, and VGA; coaxial digital and RCA analog audio; 1¾ x 17 x 13 in; 12 lb |
While I love all A/V gear, media servers are really my thing, particularly ones that can handle both audio and video. There’s just something so cool about having your entire movie and music collection available everywhere throughout the house, especially when you can stream multiple selections to different locations at the same time.
But ripping DVDs to a server is a sticky legal issue, and currently only three companies — Kaleidescape, AMX, and Fusion Research — have dared to wade into these sensitive waters. Fusion Research’s Genesis (shown at top in photo) is the least expensive movie and music server available, but it combines features and performance that belie its price tag. The base Genesis system includes a 1-terabyte (TB) hard drive that can hold about 150 DVDs or 1,600 uncompressed CDs, and the Genesis can support up to three FR-VCP2 Cinema Players for a total of four simultaneous movie or music streams. With both the server and the Cinema Player getting a recent upgrade to 1080p, I wanted to see if Genesis was ready to serve.
Like all streaming devices, the Genesis server and Cinema Players communicate over a computer network, meaning that the components connect to a router with Cat5 (or better) cabling. The system also taps the Internet to receive software updates and to look up movie and music metadata for the discs you load into it. Thanks to DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol), once the server and player are attached to your home network and powered up, they automatically receive an IP address, “find” each other, and start communicating.
The system’s default setup leaves its HDMI and digital-audio connections active, so I didn’t need to reconfigure those settings. But only one set of audio and video outputs is active at a time, which means that you can’t feed your home theater with the HDMI or digital-audio signal and simultaneously send analog audio and video to a house-wide A/V system. The system comes with an IR remote control and a USB receiver dongle. While Fusion has control interfaces for Crestron and AMX systems, Web browser control currently isn’t possible, though the company expects to implement it.
With DVDs averaging around 6.5 GB each, it doesn’t take long to fill up the base Genesis system’s 1-TB hard drive. For an additional $995, Fusion offers a 2-TB version that you can use to either double the storage or have RAID protection against data loss. Fusion also offers lifetime unlimited storage ($4,995 for the 1-TB model, $3,995 for 2 TB), which lets you add even greater capacity to the Genesis by using relatively inexpensive network-attached storage (NAS) drives.
You can import DVDs and CDs into the Genesis using the slot-loading drive on the front panel. A CD begins transferring as soon as the disc is inserted, and it’s ripped in about 3 to 4 minutes. (You can’t play a CD without importing it first.) Fusion officially doesn’t support CD-Rs, and of the five that I tried loading, only three could be imported — even though other servers, as well as iTunes on my PC, loaded them all.
For legal reasons, importing DVDs requires an extra step. You have to go to the cover-art menu, press the record button on the remote, and then highlight “Yes” to begin importing the disc. Having you click your acceptance puts the responsibility on you, the system owner, to import discs that belong to you.
A movie import — which includes the special features, all of the audio and subtitle tracks, and anything else on the disc — takes about 30 minutes and is ripped bit-for-bit with no compression. The system does let you play a DVD without importing it, although the video can’t be streamed to a Cinema Player. You can also import home movies or video files in the MPEG, DivX, AVI, and Windows Media Video formats.
Fusion lets you customize its user interface on a per-zone basis, which is not only cool but extremely useful. Beyond just being able to change the colors and backgrounds to match the décor of a room, you can tweak the settings for the best experience in each zone. For instance, you could make things easier to read on smaller screens by displaying less information and using a larger type size.
Once you’ve imported your movies and music, it’s time to sit back and enjoy them. A button on the remote toggles between movie and music screen views, and you can browse content in either List or Cover Art views. List view is perfect for finding a specific title. Movies can be sorted in a variety of ways, including by title, genre, rating, actor, or director, while music can be sorted by track, album, artist, genre, or track time. I didn’t like that the music List view displays every track, making for a huge list to navigate.
Far cooler is browsing your collection in the Cover Art view. Movie titles are sorted alphabetically, while music can be sorted by album, artist, or genre. The default view displays 21 DVDs and 32 CDs at a time, making it easy to find what you’re looking for. The first thing I noticed was how sharp and detailed the covers looked. On a good video display, it was easy to read small details like reviewer comments. And when you select a cover, it brings up a sidebar window showing either album or movie details.
Music begins playing right away when you press Play on the remote; movies start within about 3 seconds and show all the trailers and warnings that usually precede a disc’s main menu. (It would be far nicer if it skipped directly to the feature film.) You can manually set bookmarks to create save points within a movie, letting you flag favorite scenes or create a resume point if you want to finish watching later on the same system or in another Cinema Player-equipped room.
I’ve come to rely on the Silicon Optix HQV Benchmark DVD to judge a component’s video deinterlacing and scaling performance, and Genesis fared miserably on each of the tests. The waving-flag test was a mess of jaggies, and the deinterlacer never picked up the 2:3 film-pulldown cadence on the Film Detail test. (Devices that use PC-based video cards seem to have a hard time with the tests on this disc.) The good news is that in the real world, picture quality always looked quite good — at least on par with decent upscaling DVD players. Even with complex, fast-moving scenes like the climactic battles in Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith, jaggies and other scaling artifacts were never distracting. Images did look a tad softer and lacked some of the detail that the highest-end systems can deliver. While I expected to see problems when viewing video-based material like TV shows or DVD special features, that wasn’t the case.
As a music interface, the Fusion system lacks some features I’ve enjoyed in other servers and have come to expect. For instance, you can’t just quickly select and play your entire music library or all the songs from a specific artist or genre. Instead, you have to queue up albums or tracks and then create a separate playlist. Also, there’s no way to move music off the server — say, to transfer to the iTunes library on your computer. (Fusion says that these issues, too, will be addressed.)
Servers run hot, and Genesis is no exception. To keep things cool, both the server and the Cinema Player include fans that run during operation. The fan noise didn’t bother me while watching movies, but it was audible during quiet scenes. What I found more distracting was the sound of the hard drive clicking and accessing data, but Fusion assured me that models now ship with Western Digital’s new GreenPower hard drives, which it claims not only consume less energy but are far quieter.
Servers are indeed my thing, and there’s no question that Genesis provides a user experience far superior to spinning discs in a regular DVD or CD player or changer. This is especially true when you factor in that the system’s Cinema Players let you simultaneously stream multiple titles around your house, which is impossible to do with disc-based delivery.
But standing like the 800-pound gorilla in the corner of this review is Kaleidescape, the company that created the movie-server category. With so few competitors on this playing field, drawing comparisons between the two systems is inevitable. It also happens that I had Kaleidescape’s latest system on hand during my Fusion review, which invited a direct comparison. Overall, the Genesis system lacked Kaleidescape’s elegance, sophistication, and bulletproof reliability. And while the cover art in the Fusion’s interface was noticeably sharper, Kaleidescape’s video-playback performance was superior. But then again, the Fusion system is a lot less expensive. A single-zone system consisting of a 1-TB Genesis sells for $6,000 less than a similarly equipped model from Kaleidescape. As Fusion continues to expand and refine its system, it will become an increasingly more attractive way to enjoy your media.