Hi,
Thanks for your feedback. We are always looking to improve the Vero 4K and posts like these always let us keep an eye on what is important.
Firstly, I’d like to make it clear that you do not need Gigabit Ethernet for 4K playback. Others users on this forum will confirm this.
You should be able to get 96Mbps with ease via an iperf test on your device. If this isn’t the case, please start a forum post and we will look in to this further.
Like the above specification, these are average bitrates, rather than constant bitrates. The Vero 4K has 2GB RAM and can buffer ahead for sharp increases in throughput. There have been a couple of 4K titles in 2017 with very high bitrates, and we’ve worked hard to improve their playback performance so that they start up quickly and that there no random stutters.
If you do run in to any 4K content (real world, rather than 600Mps Jellyfish clips) that is problematic, we happily look in to it.
At a certain point, things just become spec-listing. The Kodi forums will show you this above anything else. They are fine as marketing points, but we would be doing a disservice to our users and future customers if we insisted that GigE was essential. Yesterday, I received an email from a user asking why we weren’t using a Rockchip based SoC, as it had six-cores, 4GB RAM and Gigabit Ethernet. The reasons are probably quite obvious. It’s not a reflection of how the device will actually do.
The thing is, while Vero 4K only has 100Mbit Ethernet, we haven’t seen any 4K UHD content that demands anything more. That might happen in a few years. But, if that does happen, you’ll be able to attach a Gigabit Ethernet adapter at low cost (or even swap to the internal 433Mbps 802.11ac WiFi) and that will do the job. There are devices on the market at the moment with Gigabit Ethernet, but with no HDR or HLG support, and at best, maybe some 10-bit 4K support. That’s not as expansible in the same way the Vero 4K is.
The Vero 4K ran an award as the best Kodi device in 2017 from AVForums.
We will continue to sell and support the best Kodi device on the market, but don’t expect any hardware changes any time soon, because they’re not necessary.
Sam