Introducing the new Vero 2

Beautiful - Amazon Video Prime, here we come :slight_smile:

Fingers crossed that it is a quick integration! Better than Standard Def streaming on Netflix will put this on par with our other Netflix streamers

Being able to have HD Netflix streaming and Amazon Video Prime means we can ditch the Amazon Fire TV’s clunky interface

Excited here, will finally be able to re-purpose my trusty old B :)… I almost hate to ask, but any ideas regarding implementation?

Many thanks ! I appreciate your taking the time to answer to all of my questions !

I will follow your project with attention, I must replace my old WD TV Live and your Vero 2 seems to be the perfect choice, open source Linux / Debian base (very important for me) and cheaper than a Shield TV :wink:

Great Work to you and to the comunity behind you !!!

Sam, thank you for all the effort. I hope there will be enough “Getting started”-like documentation available when you ship Vero 2. Especially how to install Android and boot OSMC or Android.
Looking forward to see Vero 2 in my mail. I skipped Vero 1, but now I jumped on the train, Netflix availability sold me…

Been using OSMC on my PI for a while, but its time for an upgrade and feeling pretty excited by the Vero 2!

When do you expect to ship? Will it come with a preloaded SD card? If it does, which version of Kodi will it be running? Just thinking with Jarvis release candidate just around the corner.

Probably near the end of January now. I will keep customers posted about shipping times.

There is 8GB of internal storage which will come with the latest version of OSMC installed.

Most likely Kodi Jarvis. We have already rebased against that and are producing v16 builds.

Sam

Thankyou for all the responses above Sam - all good news to me!

One last question if you dont mind, I also have a Amazon Fire Tv running kodi whcih im very happy with. How would you say performance wise the Vero 2 will compare to an AFTV. Slightly less? About the same? As i say im very happy with the AFTV performance, so would appreciate a genuine comparison.

I don’t have an Amazon Fire TV. OSMC is Linux based, so you won’t have the overhead of Android (unless of course, you’re running Android apps). I suspect you’d see better performance from Vero 2 as a result.

Nonetheless, Vero 2 is notably faster than a Pi 2 and Vero. You certainly won’t be disappointed with its operation, but I can’t quantify its performance in comparison to a Fire TV as I do not have one.

Wait…I’m re-reading the comments here and I’m a bit confused:
Does the vero 2 have gigabit lan and/or a usb 3.0 port or not??
People comment yes but in the specs it says fast ethernet and usb 2.0.

Not sure where you read Gigabit and USB3 maybe other then people having that feature request.
As you correctly wrote the spec pages (which is the source of trust) says fast ethernet and usb2.0

Will it be able to deliver as much power via the USB port as the RPi2? RPi2 is capable of powering USB3 harddrives (MAX_USB_BOOT).

BTW I remember my Cubox i4-Pro had Gigabit LAN but it was actually slower than the RPi2 when copying files from LAN to the attached usb hdd. So specifications don’t mean much. Real life performance is more important :slightly_smiling:

Theoretically, each USB can push 1.5A/5V. But if you do that on all four ports, you’re going to need a much beefier PSU.
The default PSU would support 2A means a single device with 1.5A requirement potentially will work.

A 2,5" external hard drive shouldn’t pull more than 0,7A max.
Maybe if you just connect one such hard drive to the vero2 and nothing else the delivered 2A power supply is enough to power everything.
Would be interesting to know how much A just the vero2 without connected usb devices pulls under full load…

Looks like a very interesting device. I’m seriously considering it as an upgrade for my Pi2 but have a couple of questions.

The spec says IR & RF but further up there is mention of needing a dongle for Bluetooth. What is the RF? Is it the non-Bluetooth 2.4GHz RF that some remotes use? I’ve got rather fond of my little dual-sided IR/RF switchable remote/keyboard/air-mouse (similar to this - Amazon.co.uk). Might one of these 2.4GHz RF remotes work directly with the RF in the Vero 2 or, if not, then is the RF dongle supplied with the remote likely to still work and not conflict with the built in RF?

Do you have any rough idea of how performance compares with a Pi2 with decent class 10 SD card? I think standard clock on Pi 2 is 900MHz vs 1.6GB on Vero 2 but then the Vero 2 is Cortex-A5 vs Pi 2 Cortex-A7 which knocks about 20% off so I’m guessing about 50% faster than the Pi 2.

  • Julian

I think it should be no problem. The RPi2 has a 2A power adapter that came with it. A 5400 RPM 2.5" drive is connected and might peak to 700mA or more during spin up but I have never had any issues. After spin up, it even works when I don’t use MAX_USB_BOOT. I also have a BT dongle connected. Works fine.

For now I don’t need the extra speed/features but with h265 content availability growing and with retrogaming in mind it might become interesting in the near future.

Anyone? What’s the RF in “IR & RF”? Rough idea of performance vs Pi 2?

  • Julian

RF = Radio frequency. The remote transmit radio frequencies instead IR.

Thanks, but my last post was just a very brief summary of my unanswered original post from 3 days ago. My full question is whether the frequency and protocol stacks on the RF will support my remote without a dongle, i.e. be a built in replacement for the dongle that I currently use. More details and link to the type of remote that I’m talking about are in my post from 3 days ago. That post also has details of my guess about relative CPU performance of Vero 2 vs Pi 2.

  • Julian

Hi

Your RF remote won’t work out of the box, but if you plug your remote dongle in, you won’t have any issues and it will work OK (if it works OK in OSMC already).

If you look up Cortex A5 you’ll see that it’s very power efficient but also holds its own against A7 and A9. You won’t be disappointed with the Vero 2 performance

Cheers

Sam

Thanks Sam. I just did a bit more digging and I suspect that you’re right re not being disappointed with performance. I think that your spec on the Vero 2 does it a bit of a disservice describing the CPUs as Cortex A5. From what I can see they’re actually Amlogic Krait 450 which, although based on the instruction set of the Cortex A5 reference design (I assume), is radically different in terms of architecture (out of order execution and a lot more data width, cache & parallelism in various important places). I can easily see how it would hold its own vs Cortex A7 and A9 in terms of instructions per clock on top of significantly higher clock in the first place. Exciting stuff. (The comparison chart I found is here: Comparison of ARM processors - Wikipedia)

It’s no big deal, plugging my existing RF remote dongle in is not an issue at all, but out of curiosity if the RF in “RF & IR” doesn’t support these RF remotes and it isn’t Bluetooth (or WiFi presumably since that is listed separately), what exactly is this extra RF capability intended for?

  • Julian

Hi

The CPU is not a Krait (which I believe are Qualcomm based SoCs). It is in fact based off ARM Cortex-A5, but as I say you will see performance gains over Vero 1 and Pi 2 with this chip.

IR can be used for any IR remotes, but this will require editing a remote configuration manually. RF is used for the OSMC RF remote.

Sam