Hello,
I’m planning to buy a Vero 4K + for the Holidays. It will play x264 and x265 movies in 1080p and MKV format.
Will I be fine with a microSDXC like SanDisk Ultra, or maybe Extreme? Or do I need to get an SSD?
Thank you 
Either would work; but probably the most common configuration is not to have the video files on a drive attached to the Vero 4K+ at all, but to have them stored somewhere else on the local network, and streamed across the LAN when necessary.
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That would be ideal, but I don’t have a NAS. I’ll just go with a SanDisk Ultra 256GB for now, thank you so much for confirming it’ll be fine. 
I’m not sure, for me the Vero 4K IS my NAS, I have a standard USB hard drive plugged into it and have installed the SMB Server from the App Store and can then replicate files from my PC over to the Vero, this way the Vero is a backup of my PC files and I can play films without having to have the PC on.
I’ve always viewed remote content (Vero playing files hosted elsewhere) as a more advanced setup and I wouldn’t expect most people to do that.
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Well, that works, obviously. 
One slight problem is that the Vero’s USB ports are USB 2.0 rather than 3.x. That means 1) USB hard drives can’t necessarily draw enough current from the Vero’s USB ports to power them, so you either need a self-powered drive or a powered USB hub, and 2) you’re limited to about 40MB/s transfer speeds. That’s far more than you need for smooth playback, but copying a 60GB 4K movie onto the local drive at that speed will take around 25 minutes. I don’t have that much patience! (I guess you could unplug the drive from the Vero and plug it into the PC while copying, then move it back afterwards, but that’s still extra faff).
Plus, if you’ve already got the file sitting on your PC hard drive then streaming it across the network costs nothing; but storing it locally as well means you have to actually buy a second drive (and possibly a powered hub too).
Then there’s the fact that the Vero only has two USB ports, one of which probably has a remote control dongle in it. You can plug multiple drives into a powered USB hub, and that will work fine - but only so long as you never need to copy from one drive to another; if you copy something from one drive to another drive on the same hub, the performance will be truly painful.
We’ll have to agree to disagree on that one. It’s a bit more complicated if you want to have multiple Kodi boxes reading from the same source and keeping their libraries in sync; but for a single Kodi box I don’t think setting up a Kodi source on a remote server requires any more effort than setting up a local source - it’s essentially the same procedure.
Obviously you should do what’s right for you - I’m not trying to change the way you do things. 
But for someone else who is considering how to set their system up, I don’t want them to be scared about setting up a Vero 4K+ to stream across the LAN - it really isn’t difficult.
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I don’t have an NAS either - I use a desktop PC for storage!
But anyway, you should be fine with that. Just bear in mind that a full-quality rip of a movie from a UHD blu ray can easily be 60GB; so a drive that size can fill up quite quickly.
A small solid-state drive like that should work fine connected directly to the Vero’s USB port. If you ever decide you need a larger drive and upgrade to a spinning hard disk (rather than a flash drive) then you should make sure either that the new drive connects directly to the mains for power, or that you are connecting via a powered USB hub. But as I say, that shouldn’t be an issue for a flash drive.
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All I have is an old laptop, so I guess SMB would be to ressource intensive for it.
Sure, 256GB isn’t much, but the movies will only be kept until they’ve been watched. Then, I’ll just the replace them with new ones over SSH. Seems like the best solution in the absence of a proper setup? 
Thank you for taking the time to share so many details, very appreciated!
As long “old” doesn’t mean so old your limited to a wireless G network connection it shouldn’t be much of problem and even then smaller rips would still be viable.
There is no “proper” setup. Plenty of folks are happy doing the Sneakernet thing or manual network file transfers. There are people who post here who have many drives directly attached via a hub, multiple portable storage devices they swap between, proper NAS (sometimes in multiples), storage servers, streaming app setups, UPnP setups, etc. and there is pros and cons to each. At the end of the day it is just a matter of what you want out of it. If you don’t have a need for storing multiple terabytes and large daily transfers then a basic setup like your thinking may very well be an ideal configuration in your situation.
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SMB is just the protocol that Windows uses to access a shared folder on another Windows machine. It’s not resource intensive. If you want to use your laptop as a server then it will need a network connection with decent speed - ideally gigabit Ethernet, or a decent (probably 5GHz) WiFi connection. If it has a really ancient, non-SSD hard drive, that might slow it down.
You probably wouldn’t copy files via SSH. You’d either unplug the flash drive and plug it into the laptop for copying, or just copy the files from one machine to the other over the network using Windows file explorer.
This is true. Everyone has different requirements.
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I use emby server plus tailscale, means can view anywhere, I find with a firestick 4k to take with me wherever I go it works great. As long as you’ve got good Internet that is. Had more luch with Seagate than wd, using a 12Gb one at moment with syncthing for offsite backup.
All these require little network knowledge and no fiddling with port forwarding and as such are very secure.