Look of Niveus Media center Vail Edition
The unit does not look like those bulky media centres. In fact it looks just like any other DVD or Blu-ray disc player, but with slightly larger dimensions. The front panel houses the Blu-ray drive, transport buttons and the power switch, which glows fluorescent blue when switched on. The layout is basic, the contoured front panel lends a robust feel to the centre. What's more, you also get a compact keyboard with the Vail. Why there is keyboard with Niveus Media center Vail Edition?
The Vail is a computer in itself — and that explains the keyboard; it uses the Windows Media Centre as a platform for the host of media related tasks that it can perform. Driving the centre is intel's Core2Duo mobile processor and the Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium as the operating system. It houses a 1TB Seagate hard drive, which you can upgrade whenever required. For video processing, the Vail uses an Nvidia 8 Series Graphics with PureVldeo HD technology for high quality video scaling up to 1080p. While for audio they have intel's HD Audio soundcard which can support upto 7.1 channels at 192kHz and 24-bit output. Well, all of the above is the base work for all the tasks that the Niveus can perform. What's more, its scope of work ranges from managing a complete movie library, a music library, a photo library, streaming internet radio and much more.In the movie library, you can back up your entire collection of DVDs and Blu-rays so that you don't have to look for the hardcopy of the movies every time. Just select the movie on the GUI (Graphic User Interface) and hit 'Play'. Additionally, the movie library stores all the metadata like the genre, director, lead actors, etc attached with the movie file. This helps the media centre segregate all the movies stored on the machine for easier searches from the movie library. Same goes for the music and the photo library. In addition to this, you can also burn CDs/DVDs directly off the media centre and sync your portable media player or phones to the media centre. As far as the connectivity is concerned, the Vail provides you with 1 HDMI output, 1 DVI output and a component video output along with optical and co-axial audio outputs. It also provides a good half a dozen USB ports and 2 firewire ports.
You can consider the wireless keyboard to be the best control for this unit. It houses all the essential keys with which you can practically do all the tasks on the media centre. It connects to the machine using an USB dongle*. And if you find the keyboard to be space consuming, the Niveus has provided an alternative conventional remote for the Vail. This remote is also very easy and convenient to operate. Its curved body fits comfortably in your palm with all the hot keys in immediate access.
User review of Niveus Media center Vail Edition
Being a computer by itself, we were not surprised to see a Windows desktop wallpaper on the Vail's screen. The Vail takes around a minute to boot Just like any other computer. They have given an immense range of settings for you to tweak, adjust the output resolution, output screen size, etc to suit your display. You can access all these options under Settings on the conventional remote or through the control panel using the keyboard. Once that is done, you are all set to take the Niveus experience up close and personal.
There is a single hot-key to initiate the Windows Media Centre which the Vail uses as its media platform. It takes another 30 seconds to start up. The Windows media centre greets you with a very vibrant and an intuitive GUI giving you a glimpse of all the libraries initially mentioned in the review. Digging further into the GUI, you will find out why the Microsoft Windows is the most accepted operating system in the world. Navigation through the menus is very smooth and fast as well. And what helps the most is our thorough acquaintance with the computer. It makes it even easier to swiftly browse through all the categories, search for your favorite song or movie and play it.
The video quality is crisp with no judder or playback latencies, if you load a defective or a low resolution file, the Vail will play it back in the same resolution i.e., don't expect the media centre to work some magic for you. However, on the other hand, if you give a high-resolution file like we did with the Dolby High Definition Experience', the Vail can also surprise you by rendering a picture so staggering in quality that you won't even believe in coming from your computer. The Vail did complete justice to the content from the disc samples, with vibrant colors along with a deep and defining contrast and swift unhampered playback. Same was the case with audio, wherein the Intel hi-definition audio card was working at its fullest potential to decode the Dolby True HD audio track on the disc. The audio came out crisp and resolved. At every instance, we enjoyed what we were listening to. The only negative point is that the Vail cannot play certain third party high resolution formats like the .MKV (Matroska file). TP etc as the Windows Media Centre does not support these formats, which might restrict you at times. The internet streaming facilities obviously depends on how fast or slow your internet connection is but the Vail provides you enough power and control with its highly efficient Ethernet port.
