A few of you noticed that we stopped selling Vero, our flagship device, at the end of September. Over the last few months we've been working on a new and improved Vero.
Nice clean looking unit. Thanks for the continued hard work Sam. Will be replacing my Pi2 with one of these to go with the osmc remote which I already have.
Looking forward to full specs of the unit including Android app usage.
I am thinking of buying one but I don’t want to lose ambilight. Are there GPIOs I can use for that?
No – but the Lightberry guy (Jacek) told me that soon there will be a USB based version available.
Sam
Thanks for the fast reply. I have soldered my one stripe. No idea if that is compatible.
I am searching for a powerful NAS and having a 1.6Ghz Quadcore sounds great too. Will there be an minimal OS available that would just run headless. ~140€ sounds quite cheep for that kind of performance. And USB3 support is interesting too.
You could just disable Kodi from running at startup as outlined in the Wiki, and you’ll have a very minimal system.
Sam
That sounds great. Keep up the great work!
Yes H265 support !!!
Powerfull, gigabyte port, shining design, it’s time to change my RPi2 by a Vero.
Love OSMC, Great work !
Nice machine! But I would like to know how it differs from the MxQ tv box that has the same specs on first sight.
You may have seen the Vero 2 runs at higher clock speeds than the MXQ. They both use an S805 SoC but we bin our CPUs a little more highly which means we get better performance and more stable chips.
When we were looking at S805 designs, we came across the MXQ as a reference board. I don’t think it can run Linux (Debian / Ubuntu etc), and the WiFi performance on the unit seemed very bad. One thing we have definitely learned from the original Vero is that a lot of users used the device with a WiFi connection. We have made sure that the antenna is positioned well and the throughput is good enough for HD streaming and comparable to other devices.
The housing is similar, as the SoC manufacturer have ‘public’ housing, but there are some cosmetic differences to the finish. Then obviously things like the Android software support, the remote, the case and support for Debian and it’s APT repository is quite different, even if the SoC is the same.
Cheers,
Sam
Thanks Sam! I think the new Vero is a tempting device, especially because of the performance and the fact that it has no problem with DVD-menu’s as you told me. I’ll just have to see what to do with my Vero 1…
The DVD menu issue (still frames) is still getting some treatment on the Vero 1.
Sam
To be clear the HEVC support is in hardware right?
Yes, that’s correct. The VPU will accelerate H265/HEVC decoding for 8-bit video.
Hi,
This looks very interesting!
One question tho… Would it be possible to run Raspbian/Debian Linux on this?
OSMC is based on Debian, so Vero 2 will be shipping with Debian Jessie. You’ll have the full APT repository (approximately 40,000 packages at your disposal). I think there may have been some confusion regarding our Android announcement today. OSMC is still based on Linux on Vero 2 and you’re getting the full power of apt-get and a proper GNU / Linux system; we’re just leveraging Android for additional applications and features.
Regarding Raspbian. Raspbian is an armv6l variant of Debian optimised for Pi 1. We’ll ship with Debian Jessie native, which is ARMv7 based, but Raspbian packages will run fine on the Vero 2.
Hope this clears things up
Cheers
Sam
That’s awesome!
Thank you very much.
Regards
Nick
HD-Audio? Like DTS-MA!
Excited…then I saw no 5ghz wireless. :(. Here’s hoping for Vero 3 to help the wireless crowd 
I don’t think you’d be disappointed with the 2.4Ghz WiFi module in Vero 2. We took a lot of care with ensuring it works well, even in ‘noisy’ environments and it shouldn’t be problematic.
Sam