My parents travel a lot, usually for a month at a time. A good portion of this time is spent on River boats and cruise ships and in their Motor Home. They do not have internet a large chunk of this time and currently they load movies and shows onto a flash drive to plug into the back of the televisions (but a lot of TV’s only support certain formats and don’t keep track of where they left off when they stopped whatever they were watching before). I was thinking that the Vero 4k+ would be a good solution for them possibly but had a few questions:
How large of a microSD card does it support (can I just buy them a 1 TB card or is 32GB the largest)
Is there any issues with the device if there is no internet connection
Is there a discord server for the Vero 4k or OSMC that I can’t seem to locate
I just want to find a solution that they can load their content into, plug it into a TV without internet and it just works. I don’t mind setting it all up for them before hand. Appreciate any help or advice
No – but USB is a better option in my opinion, because it’s harder to lose. Personally I wouldn’t want 1TB in the size of something my finger nail. You will pay a premium for this form factor too.
Consider a USB pendrive or even a small 2.5" USB HDD.
Vero doesn’t have a real time clock, so the time/date will not be accurate without internet. You can remove this from the home screen.
No – but we’re a friendly bunch here and happy to help. We did try a chat system (Mattermost) in 2016, but we prefer to keep things on forums so that everyone has a chance to see solutions even if they’re not keen on creating an account.
Didn’t see a way to message you directly Sam so I figured I would just ask a question in here and hope you or someone else responds… Is there a recommended flash drive or external HDD or SSD that is recommended? Seems as though with the external Hard Drives, it’s best to use a powered USB Hub or powered Hard Drive. I am trying to keep it all as small as possible for my parents so it seems as though a Flash Drive would be best, but am always open to suggestions. I saw Flash Drives from SanDisk that are 512gb for less than $50. They are USB 3.0 but I assume they are all backwards compatible. Will media played from a Flash/Hard Drive have the ability to be resumed from where they stopped a video file?
Any flash drive should be fine. I actually have two SSDs (M2) in USB3 enclosures which work fine with no extra power, but are bit bigger than a ‘pen’ drive of course.
Kodi remembers where you stopped watching something.
If they keep the Vero on all the time, they could just sync the clock occasionally wherever they can get a mobile signal (phone as hot-spot) but I don’t think it’s essential.
Just a word of caution with thumb drives. There exists lots of so called “fake” thumb drives when you start getting into the larger sizes. These are usually something like a 8gb drive that someone labeled as a 128 drive on the outside and then modified the firmware in it to make it appear as the larger drive. In this case what happens is that if you only write to data less than the real size of the thumb drive then everything is normal. Once you write more than the actual size it just keeps writing over itself so only the last <real size> worth of data is actually readable even though the file table will display as if everything is still there. So be careful chasing cost and do yourself a favor and test what you buy with something like h2testw.
I personally wouldn’t be so dismissive about using one or more SD cards. If they are going on a boat ride they probably don’t need all their media in tow. You can get a quality SanDisk 256gb microSD for under $30.
For large spinning rust type drives it is best to use ones that have their own power supply even if you can sometimes get away with the smaller sized ones that have 2.5" drives inside. If they are going to be using these in a motor home they would probably want to make sure they are powered off when driving. Unless they really need lots of storage available, it may be best to stick with solid state storage.
As Grahamh noted you can use SD/NVME drives in a USB enclosure. The only caveat I would add is that not all USB enclosures work in Linux (at least not plug and play). If you go that route when shopping make sure to dig into the review section and look for mentions of Linux compatibility.