When I first got the Vero 4K, my biggest gripe with the system was the noticeably inferior picture quality when viewing videos through the device as opposed to viewing them directly from my TV (LG OLEDB6V) or it’s inbuilt Apps/USB port. This meant I was forced to chose between high quality audio (ARC from TV to AV Receiver only passes standard Dolby and DTS at best) and the best picture quality (using TV upscaler).
The picture from the Vero 4K just couldn’t compete with my TV’s upscaling and colours looked washed out and the image looked a bit soft no matter how much I played around with the picture settings on my TV. It was just a huge disappointment going between both options and seeing how much detail, colour and crispness I was losing at the expense of having the convenience of Kodi and high quality audio.
Well after a bit of fiddling on Kodi’s menus, I’ve found the best settings and now I can honestly say I actually prefer the picture quality on the Vero 4K than my TV. I did a comparison of Luke Cage at 1080p and quality was on par with my TV, maybe even slightly better. I noticed slightly less graininess in comparison.
As for the settings : just set the upscaler to 10% under player settings and amcodec acceleration to ‘HD and Up’. I also tried 0% and 20% but these settings made image quality worse. 10% seems to be the magic number.
I also set the display resolution to 720p under ‘System Settings’ since Sam mentioned somewhere in a post that upscaling only takes place if the file is at the same resolution or below the UI. If you’re watching mostly 1080p content then you’re better off leaving the UI at 1080p. For those watching some 720p and SD content, its worth dropping the UI down to 720p. This should minimise the ‘interference’ of the device upscaler. The UI will look a grainier than 1080p but it’s worth the trade off in terms of better picture quality.
Elsewhere, just leave the settings at the default values. I set the graphical buffering to 2 instead of 3 and this made things look worse. So leave that at 3.
I’m not sure if these settings are mentioned in a post elsewhere in the discourse but I want to make sure that everyone who buys a Vero 4K sees this post before complaining about inferior picture quality and potentially returning their device as I was tempted to do at first.
Hope this helps!
UPDATE: Forget the part where I said a 10% upscale would enhance your album artwork. That’s down to the resolution. Lol.
That would mean that the setting of 0% and 10% should in theory be the same quality as 20% for the content you’ve tested, if the output resolution is 4k and the content it 1080p, because 4k is way above 20% bigger than 1080p.
Update: Wait. The scaling is tied to the display resolution, right? If that’s set to 720p, you’ve basically disabled the Vero’s upscaler and are using your TV upscaler solely - and again, 0% 10% or 20% shouldn’t matter in this case.
Update 2: That would also mean you could leave your upscaler settings at 10% or 20%, set the resolution to 1080p and achieve the same result, as the content won’t be upscaled by the Vero and your TV does the job.
I’m not as technically proficient as some of the users in the discourse, I’m just going off what my eyes show me. Regardless of what the outcome ‘should be’ as a result of the settings, a 10% upscale gave me the best picture quality settings. I’m not sure why 0% and 20% didn’t look at least ‘similar’ but my eyes tell me that, at 10% upscaling, the picture quality looks great.
I’m going to experiment with setting the display to 1080p and see if there is a degradation in picture quality. If there’s no discernible difference then all the better; you can have a crisp 1080p UI and image. I’ll update soon. Let me know if you can see a difference too.
Just give it a go and let your eyes be the judge. These settings worked for me at least and put a fairly substantial gripe I had with the device to bed.
AFAIK, the scaler is only active during playback (when the GPU is decoding video in hardware). Other than during that time, the whole interface is rendered by the CPU, so this setting shouldn’t have any effect on the interface scaling… Also see the explanation of the setting: “during playback”
I think i was wrong about the scaler affecting the UI haha. That would definitely come down to the resolution. But everything else in the post should be useful to newcomers or people who aren’t satisfied with the quality of their videos.
No, if you set the Settings → System → Video resolution to 720p with standard HW acceleration settings at Settings - Players → Video
your UI will be 720p
576p video material will be upscaled to 720p
720p material will stay at 720p
1080p material will be played as 1080p
So, it is as @rishib9000 described. If you have a lot of 720p materials from DVDs and would like to leave the upscale to your TV or do not want upscale at all with your Full HD TV, this is a way to how you get it.
Also see the explanation of the setting: “during playback”