New Vero owner - questions and possible bugs?

Help and Support Vero
1

I just received my new Vero over the weekend and spent a few hours setting it up. I am completely new to OSMC. I used XBMC on a jail-broken Gen 1 Apple TV back in 2008 but that’s the extent of my experience. For example it took me quite a while to figure out how to add my TimeCapsule SMB share to the Videos section but now I’ve got it all working. I think adding a network share certainly isn’t easy or obvious for non-techies or first time users. The other major issue I experienced was related to HDMI connectivity to my 2006 Panasonic Plasma. I kept getting a really fuzzy/mangled UI when initially starting Vero. I thought it was the HDMI cable and tried several others - it worked with the cable that my Apple TV was using! I finally figured out it was an issue with my AV amp set-up but because of all the cable swapping I did find that Vero basically mangled the UI to the point it was impossible to use (extremely large, fuzzy, most options off-screen) when the HDMI cable is unplugged/swapped. Once I got the set-up correct on the AV amp I had to manually adjust the resolution in System Settings and then I got the lovely crisp OSMC UI!

Questions

  1. Is there an option to sleep or suspend Vero when not in use? Initially I was using the shutdown option in the Power settings menu but then I realised that there was no way to power Vero back up without removing and re-inserting the power lead. So now I am just leaving it on all of the time but ideally I’d like to be able to sleep and wake Vero using my Harmony Universal remote.

  2. Speaking of the remote, I use a Logitech Harmony 900 universal remote and have manually added the Vero remote commands since Vero/OSMC isn’t in Harmony’s database. However I wasn’t 100% sure what all of the buttons on Vero remote actually do. Most are obvious of course but a couple aren’t. Is there any documentation / guide on the remote buttons? That way I can add them to Harmony.

  3. How do you completely re-install OSMC on Vero if needed? On the Quick Start Guide page it states:

For those that like to tinker and accidentally stumble in to some trouble, you can re-download the Vero software on to your device at any time at Download - OSMC

However I downloaded the OSMC Installer on my Mac and the host installer app only offers to install to either a Raspberry Pi 1 or 2 - the Vero is not listed. So how do you re-install (if needed) the base OSMC software to Vero?

  1. Is it possible to create a list of unwatched TV shows, like you get on the native Apple TV? I thought it might be possible to use a smart playlist but there doesn’t seem to be an option to create a playlist based on the ‘watched’ status of a given TV episode. Not sure if PlayCounts would work because I haven’t played the other episodes on Vero, I just marked them as watched.

  2. Is it safe to change the OSMC account password on the Vero? For security reasons I would like to change it but I wanted to know if that would cause any issues with future updates or functionality of Vero.

Bugs

  1. When there’s a software update available the alert notification icon appears slightly obscured (off screen) at the top left hand corner of the main OSMC menu screen.

  2. I frequently experience a hang when using the Power \ Reboot option to restart OSMC/Kodi. Sometimes Vero successfully reboots but more often than not it simply freezes with the ‘Power’ dialog still on screen and nothing else happens. Since there’s no on/off switch on Vero I have to pull the power lead in order to restart Vero. Is this a known issue and is there anything I can do to troubleshoot it? I’ve seen one other mention of a similar issue on this forum (with a Raspberry Pi 2 not Vero) and the response was that this was probably related to Add-Ons and NFS mounts. I haven’t installed any Add-ons and I am not using NSF mounts.

  3. When adding a network share, the IP address option on the text entry screen doesn’t seem to work. Whenever I select it Vero just freezes and becomes unresponsive for 2-3 minutes (I can’t move or enter any text or exit the screen and none of the buttons on the remote have any affect). Then suddenly the interface starts working again and I can move the cursor and select a different option. Once the UI becomes responsive again the IP address text entry option still doesn’t work.

  4. Other folks have reported this but I thought I’d mention it again. OSMC seems to create duplicate TV show listings due to the hidden ._ AppleDouble files on SMB shares that contain files that were copied to the share using OS X Finder. Apparently this is a known bug in Kodi and is already patched and should be fixed in next release of OSMC. I am not sure if that bug fix has been included in the latest OSMC release but I am still getting the issue. I have attempted to work-around it by adding an advancedsettings.xml file to my kodi userdata folder. Not sure if this has worked so far.

2

I do this with a smart playlist. Using playcount works fine for me. You can create this from the GUI without any issues, but for reference, the content of my recentlyaired.xsp smart playlist file looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>
<smartplaylist type="episodes">
    <name>Recently Aired</name>
    <match>all</match>
    <rule field="playcount" operator="is">
        <value>0</value>
    </rule>
    <limit>25</limit>
    <order direction="descending">year</order>
</smartplaylist>

When opened (I have a shortcut on my home screen), this playlist shows the 25 most recently aired unwatched episodes, with the most recent at the top. Once watched, or manually marked as watched, episodes disappear from the list.

1 Like
3

Hi

You emailed me these questions and I replied via email. I will post the answers here too for other users.

Questions:

  1. Not yet – but I am planning on adding some sort of virtual suspend
    soon. It’s completely OK (for the hardware) to leave it running all the
    time.

  2. Most keys are straight forward, the two that may confuse you are the i
    (which is information). The three lines, which are ‘context menu’ and
    the home icon (which is KEY_HOME). I hope this helps. I will try and get
    a better schematic up soon.

  3. I have yet to add the Vero image to the installer. Will probably happen this weekend.

  4. I think an addon would let you create an unwatched playlist

  5. Yes – you can change the password with ‘passwd’. Just make sure you keep the username at ‘osmc’.

Bugs:

  1. I’ll check this out

  2. I think I fixed this. Did you update to the latest software?

  3. I suspect Kodi is probably trying to search for shares in the
    background. If you can enable debug logging and get me a log via My
    OSMC, I’ll take a look.

  4. I think this got backported to 14.2 which will land soon. If it didn’t, I’ll cherry pick and add the commit

4

Thanks @ashtonaut. I’ll give that a try.

5

Thanks for taking the time to reply @sam_nazarko! I neglected to mention this on my initial post, and I apologise for that, but better late than never… Thank you for all of your work on OSMC and for making Vero - it’s a great product!

Questions:

  1. Most keys are straight forward, the two that may confuse you are the i (which is information). The three lines, which are ‘context menu’ and the home icon (which is KEY_HOME). I hope this helps. I will try and get a better schematic up soon.

Actually the ones I am not certain about are the bottom two << and >> - are they chapter back and forward? And >| (second row from bottom on the left). Is that Play/Pause (I’ve been using OK as play).

Bugs:

  1. I think I fixed this. Did you update to the latest software?

Yes I updated to the latest software on Sunday and Vero still had hangs on reboot some times - at least I’ve had one hang on Sunday when attempting a manual reboot. I will monitor and see if it keeps occurring and let you know.

  1. I suspect Kodi is probably trying to search for shares in the background. If you can enable debug logging and get me a log via My OSMC, I’ll take a look.

Thanks. I will see if I can recreate it when using the IP address option and send you the logs. Which logs do you need or does it all get sent automatically?

  1. I think this got backported to 14.2 which will land soon. If it didn’t, I’ll cherry pick and add the commit

Fantastic. I think the advancedsettings.xml is preventing the issue for me - at least so far.