It's been eight years since we announced the original Vero 4K, announcing Vero 4K + just under two years later.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://osmc.tv/2025/02/announcing-end-of-support-for-vero-4k-and-4k
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://osmc.tv/2025/02/announcing-end-of-support-for-vero-4k-and-4k
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Hi Sam,
first of all: thanks for the exemplary support you’ve provided for the 4K over the years! Hope the 5K gets the same treatment.
One question though:
Vero 4K / 4K + devices will not get further OSMC updates beyond the October 2024 update
What exactly do you mean by “updates”? No further feature/kernel updates or even no more security updates for the underlying Debian bullseye system that by itself is still on LTS support upstream until August 31st, 2026.
Cheers
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Debian updates will be available as long as Debian make them available.
Great. Thanks!
I understand you don’t make this decision lightly. And supporting different hardware is work.
But from June 2023 all the way to August 2024 you said the Vero 4k+ will get Debian bookworm.
Do I understand yesterdays announcement correctly that the Vero 4k+ will not get Debian bookworm - contrary to previous statements?
That would be disappointing. My Vero 4k+ hardware still works nicely. I dislike to see working hardware become garbage and join old smartphones in some drawer until they are thrown away.
Still, thanks for your work…
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Unfortunately as we won’t do a Bookworm release there won’t be a release for Vero 4K / 4K+. Instead we target the next Debian for this summer.
How does that work? If I buy a Vero 5 now, it has Debian 11 Bullseye, it will not get Debian 12 Bookworm, but it will upgrade directly to Debian 13 Trixie? As far as I know, Debian does not support skipping releases.
You will need to reinstall when we move to Aarch64.
Hi Sam, appreciate the work, been using this device for years now, I even wrote a few guides on getting mysql to work before it got baked in!
Any chance you could release a super basic debian / ubuntu server image so we can re-purpose our vero 4k when we buy the 5?
Many thanks again.
Personally I would just disable Kodi (it doesn’t take much space) and you should be there. As OSMC is an embedded system it is already very light. There isn’t really much else running on the system that will consume resources: if you disable Kodi you’ll just have a connection manager, disk auto mounter, lightweight LIRC daemons and SSH.
When I used 4K and 4K+ devices for compiling all I’d do for best performance was disable Kodi. I do the same on the V.
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Interesting. Is there an ETA for the reinstall with Debian 13 on arm64? Asking if it makes sense to buy and set up a Vero 5 now or wait and get it directly with Debian 13 arm64.
Also, any plans for a hardware successor to Vero 5, like a 5+ or 6? Would hate to buy a Vero 5 in summer and only get software support for 3.5 years from then.
Ever if Sam did have plans for a replacement, until it was ready to be launched he’d be wise to keep it under his hat as when a new upcoming product is announced then surely all sales of the old product would dry up and you’d be left sitting on old stock you cannot shift.
We need a formal Debian 13 hard freeze date before we can even make commitments re date. But we can start work now. The first release of OSMC was based on Debian 8 and was well in advance of release. As it was the first Debian release to use systemd (from the top of my head) the advance work was useful.
The Vero V has been out for just over a year. The 4K + was out for 5 years before being updated and the 4K, 6 years. No new device any time soon. We don’t even have a new device in the planning stage yet.
If you want to upgrade, I’d suggest doing so while there is an upgrade offer available.
There’s no disadvantage to buying early and no advantage to buying late.
Those that bought a Vero 4K for £99 in 2017 got a great deal. That turns out to be £99 over 96 months of support and it still works…
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Guilty 
It is time to move on.
The endless support that was given over the years from you and the others is from beyond this universe.
If my other 4K’s need replacement I will surely be switching to the V. Not a single doubt.
Thank you.
@sam_nazarko thank you and the team… Been fan and user since 2017… When the time commes i will upgrade to V…
Thanks a lot for making such a great media player as a relatively small business I respect that.
The vero4k appears to be an aarch64 device, presumably its possible to install a base aarch64 debian onto the system to be able to continue to use it for other purposes, and not waste some electronics. Has anyone done that before?
I see people do things like use docker to run containers on their 4k, which is fine, but I’m having trouble getting plexamp headless to work, I think it is unhappy with the alsa audio outputs, and I’d like to use systemd-networkd, and pulseaudio/pipewire… so I’m wondering if anyone has changed their apt/sources.list to point to bookworm and done an upgrade?
Hopefully the Vero V WiFi freezing issues with UHD feeds will be resolved before the 4k+ can no longer share the same database.
I installed bookworm on my ver4k+ a couple years ago when I replaced it with the Vero5 and turned it into my Home Assistant server.
from what I recall, it was not straightforward. my current sources.list on has both the bookworm debian repos, and the osmc repo. It’s still running the 4.9 kernel from osmc, but it does let me pull the arm64 docker repo to run the containers that require arm64 libraries.