So I bought a Vero 4k+ with the sole intention of running high demand 4k HDR video from my Plex server to my main TV-HT setup.
I’ve been using Xbox as my media client on my main TV-HT for years but it’s Plex client has all kinds of bugs preventing reliable 4k HDR playback.
Vero 4k + seems to have corrected that.
I use my Xbox for Youtube, Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Curiosity Stream. These apps still work pretty well so I don’t need Vero 4k+ to replace them
What else can the Vero 4k + do that I may not realize since I’ve been using an Xbox so long? I know it’s hard to ask questions like this but I’m suspecting an open source OSMC client can do some interesting stuff and don’t know where to begin.
Has anyone else moved from Xbox to Vero? What kinds of new Media consumption apps did you find useful you could not do on the Xbox?
For me, the Vero 4K+ really exceeds is as the best media player for locally stored content. It creates beautiful libraries with fabulous artwork and then plays the content with full uncompressed audio.
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Just a bit of background as it can be a bit confusing if you try to compare one type of media device with another.
OSMC is an operating system. Specifically it is a fork of Debian (currently Debian Stretch)
Kodi is an open source media player and what is providing the GUI and most of the functionality.
Vero is a player designed to be a reference platform for running Kodi.
As such using OSMC is much more like running Kodi on a PC than would be a comparison to a game console or smart TV that make available a curated list of apps that will run. If you want to branch out to other things you can do with your hardware you would be looking at what is available for Kodi or Linux. People run all kinds of things from home automation to retro gaming emulation.
For now I’m fine with the Vero 4k hardware and just wondering what other cool stuff I can do with it
I understand that. What I am trying to convey is that you are asking the equivalent of “I just got Dell laptop, what can I do with it?”. It is much easier answering a ‘can I do this’ type of question. If you spend some time browsing around this forum and the Kodi forum you will find all kinds of creative things people have done with their media setups.
Whatever Kodi can do the Vero can do so the Kodi forums might be a good starting place to discover other things you might like.
Given the underlying operating system there’s a wealth of other things the 4K+ can do as well but these aren’t always easy to implement if like me you’re a Linux noob, but these forums have extremely helpful members who pretty much walk through idiots like me when they try something new.
From my point of view the great thing that the Vero does is REMOVE the need to run Plex at all. Since the Vero can play anything I ask it to without any transcoding.
I have all my video on various Drives attached to my main PC, I use Plex to serve up those videos to any internal or external device that wants to connect and play to them.
How would I use Vero to view these files bypassing Plex? Would I just enable DLNA on plex? Consider the Vero device is not the only device I have that I want to play these videos. I’m not going to plug all this directly into the Vero
Does Vero support 4k HDR through standard DLNA playback? Does it have a nice file browser with categories and cover art when using DLNA for Movie/TV content playback?
Right now Plex works pretty well with Vero but if Plex went under would like a backup plan to play my videos from my server not dependant on a single program.
PlexKodiConnect would be the prefered way if you wanted to keep your Plex ecosystem intact while switching your interface over to Kodi.
If you don’t care about watched status, or are willing to setup trakt then you could just directly share the same files on your LAN and setup Kodi in the normal way. This is essentially what I have. I run Kodi in the normal way but also have Plex installed on my server to give access to devices outside of my LAN.
I personally don’t think DLNA is a great choice.