Ability to Connect to Wi-Fi without a Screen

Would be nice if Vero can connect to Wi-Fi without using a screen. Similar to how smart speakers are connected to Wi-Fi. Then used solely to play music.

If you could enlighten us how “smart speaker” are connecting to wifi without the help of a mobile phone with a specific APP would surely help to review this.

Sorry for the misunderstanding. What I meant by “no screen” is no TV. Smart speakers are guided by smart phones to connect to Wi-Fi.

To put it another way, it would be nice to connect the Vero to Wi-Fi in a similar way as smart speakers. :grin:

Yes via a proprietary/dedicated APP which would be an overkill for such a limited scope of cases. As the Vero is a Media Player it purpose in 99% of all cases would be to be connected to a TV/Screen

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You can use it as an airplay or UPnP receiver to stream to it which you could do without a TV if you were not using CEC and had your device plugged directly into an amplifier. I think most modern AVR’s have those functions built in as well so you really wouldn’t need to go through an extra device.

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A simpler way is something like:

Vero makes an AP
Connect to AP and pick a hotspot and enter PW.
Vero then connects

But this would need to happen in the early stages and for security reasons shouldn’t always be an option. Otherwise someone could just come in proximity with a device to compromise it.

Seeing as you have had a device for a while… I’m not sure how we could help in a secure way here. If it was an out of the box setup, then, yes.

True not for a lot of people. Just making a feature request if it’s possible. :grin:

Yes. Out of the box. How do I do that?

It’s not something that’s supported yet, but will be tested in the new recovery system and then in My OSMC.

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Sounds great :grin:

Maybe using WPA2 secured Wi-Fi AP? Where the password is generated from a deviceId or any “unique” ID.
Then if you have a screen, during the first setup it can get disabled automatically when you setup network…

The password could be set to the Ethernet MAC adddress – which is printed on the bottom of the device.

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That would be the best option I think. I don’t know any situations right now for me where this could be helpful, but I see myself in a situation where there is not possible to use any kind of screen which has a HDMI input at least, then this could be really helpful and these features makes OSMC much more better then just using Kodi on Raspbian or any other distro.

Little off-topic but maybe it belongs a little bit here: Kodi already has web-interfaces. So my question is:

  • Would not it be easier to make an official OSMC webinterface which has support for setting up the network on it and just enable this by default (at least until initial setup is done)?
  • Also do someone know why these webinterfaces seems so ‘left behind’ compared to other Kodi add-ons? I mean only a few available and also these few haven’t been updated since years I think (at least from feature-side)? I would really like a web interface where almost anything could be set-up (all settings) not just starting movies/series.
    I know that this is more like a Kodi ‘issue’ and not related to OSMC, but maybe someone could answer this. Also I think the HTTP API needs to be updated to be able to alter settings through HTTP, but I think this would make a huge difference in web interfaces…

No – this is something we would need to maintain and track Kodi upstream changes with. The Kodi web interface is not designed with the intention of handling OS level functionality.

OSMC settings are independent of Kodi settings.

Sam

For the most part everything Kodi is all volunteer work. If there is not a web interface with the features you are looking for then it is because there so far has been no one with the skills and desire to put in that work. Another reason is likely that using a Android/iOS app to manipulate Kodi has been more popular with the majority of users and as such there are quite a few more options with that method.

Chorus 2 already checks off part of your wish list.

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Yes I know that I wouldn’t complain about this. I just said that because everything else improves much faster in Kodi and there are a lot of contributors (I don’t even know any bigger end-user based GitHub project) so that seemed unpossible for me that there is really no one…

Yes that is what I use and I checked it now and seemed to improve since the last time I was there (at least in the settings page), so that maybe makes my previous point obsolete? However I didn’t compare it side by side, but still only a few sub-menus seems available in the Settings page compared to Kodi settings page. This is just a false assumption or really not all settings can be set there (and I’m not talking about add-on and skin related settings)?

AFAIK you could set most things stored in guisettings.xml, though i’m not entirely sure what the benefit of doing this with a web interface is. The mobile device apps are using the same interface so any options you find there should be possible in a web browser if someone wanted to put the work in.

Personally I wouldn’t see this as a high (or even medium) priority issue but reading the thread did give me an idea:
Would it work good enough if, instead of needing to program a lot of things for AP, captive page or app support: by default the device would try to connect to a defined SSID (“vero” or whatever) with WPA2 PSK of MAC address of the device? This would get a headless device connected enough to be able to then SSH in to setup the proper permanent network settings.

I know the above is nowhere near as nice as launching an AP and so on but it would be much easier to implement. Maybe it’s too difficult for the intended use case audience?

Just throwing out some ideas…

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