ViVo gets a whole lot cuter

The ViVo Cute-S from Digital Pro can turn your older-generation LCD TV into an Internet TV.

This Thai-made, high-definition hard disk-based move player comes with a Web browser and IPTV and Internet radio stations, as well as other Net-based features.

It’s powered by a RealTek 1185 chipset, which is not only capable of decoding high-definition movies, but also has network and Internet features.

The Cute-S comes in the same compact body as the original ViVo Cute. Apart from classic black, it’s now available in white, red, green and blue.

Digital Pro sent a Cute-S for testing whose white body looked sleek in contrast with its black front panel.

There’s a gigabit LAN port for connecting to your home router, using a transmission speed of 1 gigabit per second. At that speed you can smoothly stream video or music files from your desktop or notebook computer to play on the Cute-S, to an LCD TV or to your home-theatre receiver.

You also have two USB ports, and an e-SATA port for linking to a hard-drive dock with that capability for faster data transfer.

The RealTek 1185 chipset is quite powerful, running at 500MHz, and the player has 512 megabytes of active memory. The fast CPU and high memory allows the Cute-S to play HD movies smoothly.

I connected it to my Denon receiver, in turn connected to my LG LCD TV. It played MKV movies smoothly and the pictures were rendered beautifully and sharply, with vibrant colours. Some files that didn’t play on other models did fine on the Cute-S.

It played full-back Blu-ray movies crisply and beautifully and sent the movies’ high-definition sound data to be decoded by the receiver smoothly.

It’s great that the Cute-S supports a wireless keyboard, which is also available from Digital Pro. The keyboard is easy to set up. Simply connect the USB adapter to the USB host of the Cute-S and turn on the keyboard, and you’re ready to use the keyboard as a remote control. The touchpad lets you move the cursor around Web pages.

The Web browser works effectively. You can go to bookmarked pages or enter the Web address manually using the full-qwerty keyboard. 

If you want to type in Thai, though, you have to use the online keyboard.

On my first browse, the player had to learn to adjust to Flash player files. After that it was fine, including with its Google searches. 

   I could log on to Facebook and update my page with the Cute-S, and even chat with Facebook friends.

    If you love listening to the radio, you’ll love the Internet radio feature on the Cute-S. It can connect to Internet radio stations in the ShoutCast format and search for stations in Thailand. I pulled in a broadcast from Pattaya cleanly.

   You can pick up IPTV stations as well – those using Muzee technology. Muzee says about 5,000 Internet TV channels are available. Its application can also be used to listen to some 20,000 Internet radio stations.

And the Cute-S will let you read Yahoo Weather and Finance news, browse Picasa and Flickr photo albums and watch YouTube clips.

Digital Pro says the Chinese manufacturer of the HD player is improving the software further so it can also be used for Twitter.

The ViVo Cute-S retails for Bt4,900.

 

         Key specs

 

_ Content formats supported: AVI/MKV/TS/MPG/MP4/MOV/VOB/ISO/IFO/DAT/WMV/RM/

RMVB,MP3/OGG/WMA/WAV/FLAC/APE, HD JPEG/ BMP

_ Video codecs supported: MPEG-1, HD MPEG-2, HD MPEG-4 SP/ASP/AVC (H.264), WMV9 (VC-1), Real Networks (RM/RMVB) 8/9/10, up to 720p

_ Audio codecs supported: MP2/3, OGG Vorbis, WMA Standard, PCM, LPCM, RA, DTS, Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD

_ Subtitle formats supported: SRT, SMI, SSA,SUB, IDX+SUB

_ I/O interfaces: USB 2.0 x 2, eSATA, (CVBS) A/V, Component Y/Pb/Pr, HDMI V1.3, S/PDIF optical jack

_ Dimensions: 15.5x12.5x4cm 

_ Weight: 544g