Potential Vero 4K+ buyer seeking advice

Help and Support Vero 4K / Vero 4K +
1

Hello guys and girls in this community,

i’ve been wanting to buy a Mediaplayer for a few months now. the last 2 options were probably the best regarded boxes on the market: the vero 4k+ and the nvidia Shield.

After reading through this forum, seeing the amazing support that sam and everybody else is providing, and knowing a few issues that the Shield has, the choice seems pretty obvious :slight_smile:

Currently i have this setup at home:

LG c7 oled TV, cable connected to my Router.
The Router has an external usb 3.0 hdd connected to it’s 2.0 port.
The Router is then cable connected to a PC (older i5cpu, gtx650 and 8gb RAM, 2Tb HDD), which serves as an Emby/Plex Server.
150mb down-/10mb upload connection (soon 20mb upload)
I have a denon x3400h av-r that will soon be installed (cable connected)

My goal was to keep this setup, buy the vero 4k+, connect it to the av-r and stream all my content this way with Plex (including MKV 4k HDR files).

Sadly it won’t work i’m afraid: with my setup as it is, 4K files take forever to load, skipping forward takes ages, and constant buffering. Even with the files on the PC HDD, removing the PGS Subtitles and higher resolution audio formats like Dolby TrueHD, didn’t help.

I dont 't think the higher upload Speed, the av-r or the Vero will fix that. And i’m OK with that. I understand that neither the Plex Server, nor the Routers USB 2.0 port are powerful enough for 4k HDR streaming with Plex. Strangely tho, when i stream directly to the TV (without Plex), using the TV’s own Mediaplayer, it works perfectly, even with Dolby TrueHD embedded in the file (Subtitles don’t load).

As long as i can stream 1080p to my other devices (laptop, smartphone, when i’m abroad, it’s fine).

But for the Oled TV i really wanted 4K HDR resolution + hd audio + subtitles…

So my questions are:

After buying the Vero, what is the best (bulletproof) way to playback my 4K HDR content, at the least amount of costs…?

Should i connect the HDD directly to the vero or leave it on the Router?

Would a SSD improve things?

Maybe buy a Router with 3.0 ports?

I have a New rpi3b+ which i use to run as a pi hole and pivpn… Since it has USB 3.0, can i connect it to my Router via Ethernet cable, plug in the content HDD and use it as a Plex Server for 1080p? (It’s less power hungry than a PCf to leave on all the time).

I’m aware that my setup has too many bottlenecks, but i’m fine with some shortcommings like not being able to stream 4K HDR over Plex, and needing to reencode some movies to 1080p.

A NAS would help, but NAS are expensive, and i’ve read that most of them struggle with transcoding too…

I hope someone could guide me in the right direction.

Sorry for the long thread.

Keep up the good work, happy to support it soon :slight_smile:

Cheers
Mario

Edit: there are some partition types that are supposed to work better than others. Ext4 (Linux type i think). Would this help with high bitrate files?

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I’ve moved your post to the Vero 4K/4K + section… The Vero section is for the first Vero. :+1:t2:

1 Like
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Thank you Chillbo. Sorry for that

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Will you be connecting the Vero 4K+ directly to the router or will you be using wifi?
If its the former my first thought is to forget about using Plex and just use Kodi’s library function to read the movies from the hdd.
If you find the routers USB port is a bottleneck I’d then try the hdd connected to your PC and setting up some shares to the Vero from that.

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I always connect my devices with a cable when it has a port, so yes, cable for the vero too :slight_smile:

If possible i would like to avoid using the PC at all, and use something a bit less ressource hungry like a rpi3b+ as a server…

Plex would be needed only for 720/1080p sharing when i’m on holidays and such, but of it’s a no go in this Situation, i skip the idea and just copy the files to the Smartphone, Laptop before going :stuck_out_tongue:

Thanx for the reply

6

Hi,

The Raspberry Pi is actually USB 2.0. Same as 4K +.
USB 2.0 bandwidth is sufficient to stream multiple 4K streams simultaneously. Your router however may be underpowered; or you may be limited to 100Mbps on the router.

Plugging in the drive via Vero 4K + should be fine. You can also share the files with other machines quite easily. I do recommend you power the drive externally however.

Hard to say from the context of the router; but on Vero I’d recommend avoiding NTFS if possible.

Please let me know if you have any further questions.

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Rather a lot of questions, there…

In terms of what to buy, don’t buy an Nvidia Shield TV: it’s an absolute train-wreck of a device, and I can’t even begin to understand why it’s so popular.

Depending on precisely what you want to do, an alternative you should perhaps consider is the AppleTV 4K.

From your description of your set-up, if the TV can stream files across your LAN without any problems, then it can’t be either the speed of the network or a USB 2.0 port that is causing the bottleneck. At a guess, I’d say your problem is the PC: if the Plex server application is trying to transcode a 4K video file in real time, the PC probably doesn’t have enough processing power to do that.

In terms of accessing files on the Vero 4K+ I can’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be able to stream files directly off the drive that is connected to the router - you wouldn’t need to turn the PC on, or use any type of Plex server.

(You can’t actually run a Plex client app on the Vero 4K anyway. It pretty much only runs one application: Kodi. There is a Kodi plug-in which allows it to pull files from a Plex server; but unless you want to go on holiday and take the Vero 4K with you - and attempt streaming over the Internet - I can’t see that using Plex actually gains you anything, here.)

8

In my scenario you wouldn’t need to ditch Plex altogether, just not use it with the Vero.
Assuming the router’s USB port is running at full USB 2 speed Kodi on the Vero 4K+ should be able to read the shares from the router and play 4K files without a hitch, my 4K+ plays full uncompressed 4K HDR perfectly just using SMB shares from Windows NTFS formatted hard drives.
You can leave Plex as it is now for when you’re away from home.
Are you using the Plex app on the TV? If so I suspect the TV’s ethernet adapter would be the limiting factor for getting 4K videos working, before I invested in my Vero’s I tried Plex on my LG TV before but I gave up on it when I experienced the same issues you describe.
On my 1st gen Vero 4K I had similar issues until I set up fstab on it but with the new 4K+ it just worked straight out of the box.

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Hey there,

sorry for replying only now, it’s been a busy weekend installing my Denon x3400x and my Atmos surround set. I’m sure they’ll love the Vero :grinning:

@sam_nazarko:

Yeah, my HDD is powered over USB… I guess i’ll keep it only for storage, and buy a powered external SSD drive (do those even exist???) or even better a NAS, if i find a cheaper one.

@angry.sardine:

An Apple TV is not an option for me due to Apples financial philosophy… :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Yes, Plex transcodes, and i don’t know why since i removed every audio type and subtitle track embedded in the MKV file, that supposedly the LG C7 and Plex struggle with. So i think i’ll dump the idea of using it for high Bitrate files.

@Buckeye:

True. Vero + Kodi will do the heavy lifting with 4K at home, and Plex with up to 1080p abroad… Yesterday i set up an OpenVPN Server on my Pi, so i can access my files at home… If this works out fine and the Speed is OK, i might not even have to use Plex at all, and just rely on Kodi :wink:

Thank you so much to all the replies. Amazing support guys!

I’ll be back if i run into trouble using the Vero… Played a bit with Linux OSes in the past and use Kodi since 2013, but am definitely not an expert :joy:

Happy to be a future customer and supporter of this project.

Cheers to all

1 Like
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Great. Let us know if you have any questions

Sam

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Why do you say that?

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Because the linux NTFS drivers are userspace, so the performance is not as good as you would get using exFAT or even better ext4. The only problem with ext4 is that there is very limited support on Windows. So if you want a drive that you can use on Windows or the Vero, format it as exFAT. If the drive is only going to be used on the Vero (or another linux system), use ext4.

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My USB drives,I have 3, came preformatted NTFS and I just put my files on there and plugged them into the Vero. Tru
Most of my viewing is UHD with Atmos/DTS-HD MA and I have never had any performance issues.
It would be too much for me to change my file system at this point seeing that I have 17TBs but I’m curious as to what performance benefits exFAT would provide over NTFS with the Vero.

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If the drives are working for you and you have no problems, then just leave them as is.

Since the NTFS drivers are userspace, heavy access to the drive will use more CPU than an exFAT or ext4 formatted drive. If you get new drives in the future, then it’s best to use either exFAT or ext4 on them.

This is all thinking that the drives are USB and directly connected to the Vero. If you are accessing them over the network that’s going to depend on what type of system they are connected to. If they are on a Windows system then NTFS will be just fine. If they are on a NAS, it would depend on the NAS.

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Yeah, they’re plugged directly into the Vero 4k+ USB2.0 port.
If I need to move a file from my laptop (windows) to the USB HDD, I just transfer it via SMB through the gigabit lan if it’s 5GB or less, if it’s 50GB+ UHD Remux or multiple files then I shut downs the Vero and plug the HDD into my laptops USB3.0 port.
The Vero’s USB2.0 port is more than sufficient for playback but transferring files usually maxes out at 25MBs, which is very slow compared to the >160MBs I get with the HDD directly connected to the USB3.0 port on my laptop.
Maybe one day the Vero 4k++ will have USB3… :wink:

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For your use then, I’d suggest that future drives be formatted exFAT. Leave the current drives as is if you are not having performance problems.