stardust80
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Review of Vu+ Solo
The Vu + Solo is created by a corean company Vu Plus , already established to have created older brother Vu + Duo with twin tuners. Let's see what are the peculiarities and characteristics of this product, which in a few months has already gained a good market share and especially in important development team, being a perfect combination of excellent performance and very low cost.
Package
You will find Vu + Solo packed in a cardboard box than from the outside does not show much, if not the specific characteristics of the product. It’s down with corpulent cardboard that is an optimum benefit for transportation, with a package so strong in fact, our decoder will be protected from any impact. Inside the box you will find: receiver, remote control, batteries, the instruction manual and HDMI cable, all carefully and individually wrapped.
Technical characteristics
My personal opinion is that the appearance of the box is very pleasant. Compared to Vu + Duo in fact it looks a bit 'less Spartan with an appearance much more accurate. On the left there is a circular glass that contains the remote control sensor, and three status LED, green, orange and red. On the front you will find five buttons, which are very useful if you do not have near you the remote standby, ch +, ch-, vol +, vol-.
The reclining door conceals a generous endowment for a decoder so ecnomic: 2 common interface, a cardreader conax embedded, and a USB 2.0 on the front that is for sure the strength of this decoder, if we consider that it’s one of the few in its class to possess it.
On the back, the supply of the connectors are rich and generous. From left, the BCM7325 DVB-S2 tuner, serial port for any emergency update , a scart.
The central part is the heart of the decoder: a reset button, HDMI, ethernet, and USB 2.0: this ons is multi-functional that will give us the opportunity to add hard drives, usb pen drive, digital terrestrial tuner , wlan, all functions that we shall see in detail later.
Further to the right , the generous rear panel Vu + Solo is completed from the output component (please notice that the direct competitors such as dreambox this kind of output is present only on the l DM8000 mode), 3 RCA audio video, optical digital audio output . The big lack is unfortunately represented by the absence of an on/ off power button, but it must be said and emphasized that after the first update , we won’t miss it. Vu + Solo is stable and functional and we'll hardly have to pull the plug due to a problem. The link is easily carried out for almost any video device, it could be a CRT television, a projector, LCD, Vu + Solo always have the right output you will need.
The remote control is undoubtedly the biggest surprise of this decoder. Seeing it on the net I was worried, but I realized that it is the most beautiful and valuable part of this decoder. The **** are small but very precise, the switch on the decoder is a real bomb and it would never happen to press a button with working. The remote, even if pointed in the direction completely opposite to the decoder, will always be able to do his duty. I've never really seen anything like this on other brands of decoders, you can hardly find a remote control, precise and responsive as that of Vu Plus
At a first look inside what you immediately will notice is the absence of a plug & play tuner. On the Vu plus he tuner is in fact an integrated part of the motherboard. You may also notice that everything in the box is neat, clean and well-studied: separate power supply of the motherboard can be easily replaced in case of failure, and the front cam and the card reader completes the inside equipment. There is no fan installed on this box, so it will always be quiet, and the temperature inside will never be a concern. In the test I have done, even after several hours of using Vu + Solo it remains always cold, the heat is practically very little and small amount that is product is dissipated very quickly by the slits. The hardware has the maximum of the votes
This is the complete details of hardware of the decoder::
Open-Source Linux Enigma2
Processor Broadcom 333 Mhz MIPS
BCM7325 DVB-S2 Tuner
128MB NAND Flash/256MB Ram
MPEG2 / H.264 decoding Hardware
2 x Common Interface slot
1 x Smartcard-Reader (Conax embedded)
Ethernet 10/100 Mbit
2 x USB2.0 (1in the fronta/1 on the rear)
1 x V.24/RS232
HDMI Output
Audio / Video cinch out
1 x Scart
1 x YPrPb
1 x S / PDIF optical digital
1 reset button
Size: 28cm x 20cm x 4cm (width / length / height)