Anyone that wants to avoid my drawn-out explanation/intro, just skip to the bolded text for my question.
For a while now I’ve been in search of a decent media player that will allow me to play the backup ISOs I’ve made of my DVD collection, which has shrunk and is now stored in the basement as it was supplanted by blu-rays and UHDs. What’s left is mostly stuff that either can’t or likely won’t ever receive the HD treatment.
This may not seem like a tall order in the era of 4K, HDR, Atmos, Rec. 2020 and so on, but surprisingly it’s not something that any of the devices I’ve tried has done particularly well. The latest candidate, a Zidoo Z9S, failed miserably as far as its internal Home Theatre player software goes, which isn’t able to automatically adjust for the non-square pixels on a DVD… which gets especially annoying when an ISO contains a mix of 4x3 and 16x9 content. You’ve got to constantly change the aspect ratio manually depending on what you’re watching… and for menus (which can also be in either ratio) you don’t even have that choice, so you’ve just got to deal with the distorted picture.
The lastest versions of Kodi, on the other hand, seems to handle DVD ISOs as close to perfectly as one could hope. Whether you’re in a menu or one of the disc’s titles, Kodi (based on my tests) adjusts the aspect ratio on the fly and displays everything correctly. The Zidoo isn’t able to run the latest 18.x Kodi versions; they just crash out after a few minutes. Supposedly this is due to its Realtek chipset, but that’s as much as I’ve been able to find out about it. At this point it’s just an expensive paperweight that I’d be happy to be rid of.
So I gave up on the idea of these expensive boxes that try to promise everything and end up doing it all in a mediocre way, and tried to find the optimal box for just running Kodi, preferably with as little else going on as possible. That led me to the Vero 4K+.
Basically, what I’m hoping to get before I purchase a Vero 4K+ is input from anyone that routinely watches DVD ISOs (full rips with menus/etc), and can confirm that its performance is on par with what I’ve experienced running Kodi 18.4 (before it crashes) on the Zidoo Z9S… only hopefully even better, as I’ve read Kodi performs better on Linux than Android.
Though I probably won’t use a ton of the other Vero features at the moment, I do have a 4K TV as well as several 3-D TVs, so some of its more advanced features as well as the new frame-packed 3D support may come in handy for the future.
You can even output DVDs at their native resolution at 576p/480p with the latest update and with native aspect ratio (true 4:3 or pillarboxed in a16:9 frame).