I recently acquired top of the line Vu+ satellite receiver. Before that I was struggling with Duo2 which was partly damaged, it was also randomly freezing which indicated motherboard problem.

I then decided for Duo4k which has ARM type of CPU and should have superior media support. I was wrong. There is not much info on English forums (more info available on German ones – here for example) because receiver is quite new and also not cheap. Not a popular choice by SAT and IPTV enthusiasts.

Here is table from vuplus-support.org forum which indicates what was changed between BCM chipsets regarding video codec support (ARM64 is the one which is used by Duo4k):

As you can see, latest BCM chipset used in Duo4k does not support old codecs. More information about these codecs:

• VC1: Designed for Windows Media Video 9 from Microsoft 2003
  
• WMV and WMA are Microsoft implementations of VC1
  
• MPEG-4 Part 2: developed from 1999, used in DIVX, XVID, QuickTime and others, h263 compatible.
  
• VP6: developed in 2003, is mainly used in Flash video.
  
• VP8: developed around 2008 as successor of VP7.
  
• SPARK: h263 implementation, developed around 2002.

The most problematic is lack of old DIVX/XVID support, because there are many older movies and especially series which are only available in this format (.avi container). Avi container can still work fine, but it depends on codec used. You can also have .mkv files that wont work properly!

What about audio support? Well, even here there are problems. DTS downmix for example doesnt work. I do not know about DTS passthrough because I only use stereo speakers. This is the biggest problem regarding audio support, because DTS is widely available. There might be other not supported audio codecs.

What is the conclusion? Price cutting of Broadcom sadly affected our newest ARM based Vu+ receivers. At the end of the day, these receivers are really only STBs and not media players. It is just a bonus and for better support you need to use dedicated media player.