A Vero 4K newcomer thoughts and concerns

General Discussion
1

I am pleased with my Vero 4K, small and neat and no doubt capable. However I have learned some hard lessons as I tried to set it up.

I had assumed that UK free to air/ freesat channels would be readily available for streaming through the Vero 4K box. However it seems all the add-ons that stream them seem to be blacklisted or unavailable. Indeed many of the non-OSMC/KODI sites seem to be high risk. As I searched for information on add-ons my industrial grade anti-virus software was pinging away every few seconds as it found mal/spyware on most sites, even before downloading!

I had also hoped that there might be some French free to air channels as well, I have only found Arte 7 so far, MyCanal did not work (non-French IP address?)

The other hoped for use was, mostly adhoc, access to web videos. For example our son appears on financial tv around the world which we usually access via their catch up services, embedded video or directly from the urls he provides. As I am now a journalist (formerly heavyweight IT consultant/project manager) I have varied needs for such purposes. I had hoped that there would be a way of creating a library of such links or at least be able to get browser access to such video.

We watch next to nothing that we have locally on disc and have practically eliminated subscription tv.We spend a lot of time travelling (no tv) and at home we do not sit and watch much tv.

As a writer and photographer (and a software developer in times past) I am extremely rigorous about copyright abuse. I protect my intellectual property vigorously and give full respect to other peoples. I had not realised just why VPN was so important to many internet tv users. It now seems, to me at least, to be a means of abusing copyright and hiding from the responsibility. Hugely disappointed with that aspect, and those people but I guess I should not have been surprised.

So I now appreciate that a media streaming device is probably not what I needed. I had thought of perhaps using an old laptop or a micro tower PC as a web browser video source. My internet tv is unusably poor and I object to having to go through portals that are farming data from my activities.

So I have a question. Can I install a minimal desktop and browser on the Linux on the Vero 4K and ignore the OSMC layer? It would still be cheaper than buying a cheap pc.

I am a bit cross but I blame no one but myself. The hype around media centres misleads the casual researcher, I should have been more careful. I appreciate OSMC do not make any such claims.I am conscious that the landscape is changing all the time, perhaps with Kodi v18 we will be a bit nearer to my ideal solution…

Disappontedly
Martin

2

Hello

In the UK, you can connect an aerial and get DVB-T2 broadcasts aka Freeview.

You could also use a DVB-S2 stick but only a few sticks are supported.

This would let you watch live tv and schedule recordings. This is legal if you have a TV license.

Kodi has a lot of catchup addons and TV addons. The ones we include are legal and free to use. VPN is also sometimes used to evade checks for location, i.e to watch content not normally available in one’s country.

With Kodi v18 there will be support for more DRM services. For example Netflix and Amazon Video will be available. After that, more will likely follow, such as Sky Go.

A browser will work but video wouldn’t be hardware accelerated. Flash player is also not available

Sam

3

Has anything changed since I raised the issues above? It seems that Kodi v18 has still not released so the new services are not yet available I assume. I am about to reconfigure my TV options (I will be watching less, but more selectively due to new time commitments).

When I tried last November there was not really browser support on the Vero 4K without dropping out of OSMC/Kodi into Linux and using a native Linux browser, may be my end solution despite lack of hardware acceleration.

4

You can install Kodi v18 (which is still in alpha build) by grabbing a test build under the Testing and Development section.

A browser is available: search for Chromium.