As I have been running the ClarkeTech for now over a year I have been mostly happy with the box, specially since I found the VXI Image here on this board. It wasn't the fastest box in the world but VXI team made it a fairly good box that worked very close to what a "normal" satellite receiver does.
One of the biggest problem with the ClarkeTech box is that you can not record HDTV channels on tuner 2 if they are broadcasted in 1080i, it would be absolutely rubbish on the recording. This, I can understand from forums like this, has been fixed in newer revisions of the box.
The Solo2 is an absolutely great box in so many ways. It is truly blistering fast and when the kernel can finally utilize the dual core CPU I think there can be done a lot of really incredible things on this box. It has good support for 1080p, which very nice as we properly all has support for this on our television sets.
There are thought some issues still on the box that we can just hope that VU+ fixes quickly with driver updates (as I can understand from the VXI posts) so that you can not view a recording at the same time as you a making the recording which is a bit annoying.
The remote control is another matter. I are going to miss the remote from the ClarkeTech which I think is so much better than the remote from Vu+. The VU+ remote has the same missing buttons as the Dreambox remote has, the ClarkeTech remote is much more complete in that regard. The layout of the remote is also much better on the ClarkeTech than on the Vu+ remote which make it simpler to navigate the ClarkeTech than the Vu+ Solo2. Can we hope for a better remote in the future?
Quick note about the images Black Hole and VXI.
As VXI wasn't available when I bought my box, I installed the Black Hole image on my new Solo2. It seems like a good image in many ways, but they are making things a bit hard to use at times. The EPG has a strange layout I do not like at all, and I haven't been able to find a way to change the default behavior. The Blue button takes you in to a Cam manager but their different solutions are a bit hard to understand, in my opinion.
The VXI image is more complete from the start with use of the remote a bit better. The EPG button takes you in to a multiple view of EPG of all the channels as I would expect, there are more settings to be done like automatic time shift etc. I do miss the build in clock in the default skin in the info bar on Black hole and the Media player that starts when looking at DNLA servers, but that can be fixed with new skin and plug ins.
If anyone is looking into buying a good two tuner box, then I would definitely recommend the VU+ Solo2 especially if you are going to install the VXI image. If the the track record of the VXI team is something to count on, and I think it is, then this combination is going to be outstanding.
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