So my Vero4K arrived the other day and finally got around to sorting it. Have so far come across problems making it impossible to use in my setup, hoping I’ve just got some settings wrong as my 5 year old Mede8er has none of these problems. Setup is Denon AVR-X2100W into Panasonic TX-42GT50 via HDMI (ARC). Sky HD+ and Mede8er (now Vero 4k) connected via HDMI only. Files are served via cat5e using NFS shares. No issues at all. All files are mkv straight from BR.
Now I have the following issues:
Without any power, plugging in HDMI caused my TV to tell me to check my HDMI settings and ARC no longer works, this is before the device is even powered.
Video stuttering. As far as I can tell I’ve gone into advanced settings and told it to change the frame rate to match the video and change at start/end only. My TV goes into 24p mode but the video stutters. There are no such problems with the same file on the Mede8er, it is silky smooth.
Audio breakup. Again I believe I’ve checked all the right boxes for what the device supports, indeed I must’ve done to get sound. With both DTS-MA HD and TrueHD I experience breakup shortly after each movie starts. Again no issues on the Mede8er for the same file.
Subtitle support. There seem to be no handlers installed by default? A little strange.
A minor niggle but the front LED is very bright.
I really hope these can be resolved because I don’t want to return it.
I’m sorry to hear you are having some problems with the device.
Vero 4K is designed to be always on. There is also a low power standby mode. When the device is powered on, does ARC work as expected?
Not sure why that would be. The most probable reason would be that there’s a throughput issue.
A debug log would confirm what the cause of the stutters are. I understand you are using NFS, which performs better than SMB. Some users also find a good performance boost from mounting their shares in /etc/fstab as this provides read-through. This is usually essential for watching high bitrate content such as 4K material.
The audio breakup is probably correlated to the issue above.
To confirm if you are looking at a throughput issue; you could also try local playback from a USB hard drive.
That’s expected. Kodi doesn’t include any subtitle add-ons by default.
Subtitles add-ons such as OpenSubtitles can however be found in the Addon repository and be installed from there.
Still get the same message telling me to check configuration of HDMI devices from my TV
I’ll see if I have time to give it a go. It’s a bit odd though as my other player has no such issues and is much lower spec. The 100Mbps should make no difference as the bitrate is much lower, though the Mede8er does have a gigabit connection.
Yes! Both The Adjustment Bureau and Batman Begins which were both jerky are VC1 and the film that was OK (The A-Team) was AVC. Is there a problem with VC1 on this hardware?
Yes there seems to be unfortunately. There’s another thread on it. You can work around it by forcing them to play at 60hz but it’s not the best solution unfortunately. There’s some chat of Kodi 18 fixing this but I don’t think that’s been confirmed.
Hmm, well if it’s hardware related I’m not sure it’ll be fixed by software? I wanted the Vero to replace my Mede8er but I guess it’s not going to be able to I have no real need for 4K at the moment.
I feel your pain. I bought this to replace my Shield TV but the Vero 4k has problems playing back 4k HDR content on my current TV and it can’t play back VC1 files at native frame rate. Over the weekend, the Shield TV had a software update that appeared to solve all of the issues I had with it (failure to auto-switch output resolution and frame rate) and it looked like it was going to be able to do everything I wanted it to. However, further testing the following day showed that it wouldn’t automatically switch between REC 709 and REC 2020. This basically means that I’m back to having to manually switch resolutions again.
The Shield TV can play back VC1 files without problems though and can playback 4k HDR correctly on my TV so it’s probably only one software update away from being the media device I expected it to be. The only thing is NVIDIA are very slow with the updates and very poor at communicating what they are working on, so there’s no way of knowing if this will be on their list of things to fix.
I actually really like the Vero 4k and the ongoing support from Sam is both noted and appreciated…but I’m worried that the two issues I have simply can’t be fixed without a hardware update. The inability to play back VC1 files is a bit of a show stopper to be honest and i’m baffled that it wasn’t picked up on in reviews. It would be helpful if the developer could publicise the hardware as being incompatible with VC1 playback.
To be honest I can’t fault Sam but it really needs to be mentioned that it fails on something so basic. If it wasn’t for that and the fact it breaks ARC on my TV it’d be replacing my Mede8er
I was in a similar situation to you but with a Mede8er 600x3d. I have no need for 4K support as yet but it would never recognise PCM 5.1 audio in my rips and I’d not managed to find an answer. However after more digging last night I managed to find the answer…simply changed the stream ID in the MKV…and bingo it works! There has been no updates for it for nearly 2 years but as it does everything else I need it doesn’t matter.
I’m sorry to hear that. That isn’t expected however and I would recommend trying another HDMI cable. We haven’t had any reports of issues with ARC when Vero 4K is powered.
This isn’t the case.
What is needed is a VC-1 bitstream parser to be added to Kodi. The SoC requires a PTS to be input. Unfortunately there are some VC-1 streams which don’t have a PTS, which is why you experience stuttering. With a bitstream parser, we can either correct the PTS for a frame or inform the decoder of the frames which we do know the PTS for.
I’ve noticed that high quality sample clips do have a PTS, which means that Vero 4K wouldn’t struggle on these. Some rips however don’t.
There wasn’t enough time to look in to this issue for it to make it in today’s update, but it’s on the list and being looked in to. I wasn’t aware that playback at 60Hz remedies the issue. That’s certainly interesting and I will investigate that.
I understand that @Paul_Solecki wants to return his device; so he might not see these improvements, but will ping others for testing when ready.
Thanks for the support Sam, will no doubt be back next year when I finally bump everything to 4K The ARC one is a little strange, it’s not the amp that complains, it’s actually the TV.
I have no real need for 4K at the moment.