From my previous blog I discussed how DVD kiosks will be the future for movie purchases and rentals. It was mentioned that this process has become more of a reality because the method by which the content protection encoded in the discs has been relaxed to incorporate newer technology. What I didn’t mention was the most important feature in this whole process, the robotic duplicator “autoloader” which controls the entire process.

If you’re reading this blog, chances are that you’ve burned a disc at least once through your computer or a dedicated duplicator like the Vinpower Digital SharkCopier or TITAN series. The basic principal is simple enough, load a blank disc into a writer drive and information from an alternative source (HDD or reader) is burned onto the blank disc. This is a simplified explanation, but gives one the basic principal of how a duplicated disc is created. However, to build a kiosk, you can’t count on a user loading and unloading the blank disc that is meant to be duplicated. That’s where the autoloader comes in.

An autoloader is a duplicator with a robotic arm that can be programmed to pick up blank discs from a specified stack, load them into the corresponding writer drives and or printer and then remove the finished disc and place them in a specific location. It all sounds so very simple, there are so many variables that come into play that it’s actually far more complicated than one may imagine.

That’s why the number of autoloaders on the market is dwarfed compared to the number of manual towers available. Manual towers are easy to build given the right parts, but autoloaders are extremely complicated to build if you don’t have the knowledge and experience to do so. If done right, the autoloader is extremely easy to operate and runs flawlessly 24/7 as intended. If not, the user ends up working harder to get the unit to work than if they had just made the copies manually on a tower. The whole purpose of an autoloader is to make duplication easier and capable of producing higher volumes than humans who need to eat, sleep, and take bathroom breaks.

So when you see one of these DVD kiosks in the future, now that inside there’s an autoloader like a Vinpower Digital TITAN working hard and tirelessly to provide you with the content you want.