I use a Popcorn Hour V-Ten to play media but am mindful that new tech means I’ll have to update my equipment in a while and I’ve been trying out media players to try and find a brand to upgrade to when it become necessary as Popcorns are no longer manufactured. Mostly I’m trying to find one that has a good U.I I can bear (most don’t).
And it appears nearly everything new is going to be some kind of Android/Linux based, likely Kodi, player (which I don’t like for a variety of reasons).
I got a Vero delivered today and have been testing it - and it looks a recognizable though modified Kodi on Android Linux based device with one notable feature I’d like to report - which is why I named this topic after my TV (65 inch OLED) - the Vero does something no other player I’ve tested does; it manages to tell my TV if the source it’s playing is HDR so that the TV automatically switches to HDR10 mode - the message doesn’t seem to get through from any other player.
Which is excellent (because it takes a tonne of button presses to turn HDR on and off otherwise - a real pain).
It isn’t? Well, I guess I just assumed that from the GUI seeming so much like all the other Android/Kodi devices - so it’s a Linux/Kodi device (I guess I’m probably just so used to the Android/Kodi combination I forgot it doesn’t have to be so).
Just to clear up the whole “Android/Kodi” thing, the two have very little to do with each other. Android is an operating system just like Windows or MacOS. Kodi is a piece of software that runs on many different operating systems. Your Vero uses OSMC as an operating system which is a fork of Debian Linux. If you are looking for information of what you can do with your system it is much more useful to think about what you can do with Linux, and what you can do with Kodi, than it is to relate it to some other packaged product on the market.
As for the Display settings…
We recommend people with 4K TV’s set their user interface (UI) to 1080p. Kodi’s UI is not optimized for 4K yet and this can put unnecessary demands on your device and can lead to a suboptimal picture quality, as well as potentially cause other issues.
The settings we recommend are as follows…
Settings>System>Display>Resolution> 1920x1080p
Settings>System>Display>Whitelist> (empty)
Settings>Player>Videos>Adjust display refresh rate> On start/stop
Some televisions may also need, or benefit from, the following being set…
With the above settings your UI will be output in Full HD and your 4K content will be output in 4K. If you have any doubt, feel free to upload some logs so we can verify that your settings are indeed correct.
I never had a problem with the resolution. As soon as I plugged the Vero in I recognized the, mostly, familiar Kodi options and went through the routine setting of audio channels and display resolution and it all worked perfectly fine. (FYI - one of the reasons I don’t like the Android based players is they often have real problems with recognizing how many audio channels are supported).
I then - because this is a feature I was specifically looking for in a media player - went to play a H265 10Bit HDR source to see if my TV would automatically switch to HDR10.
And it did, which pleased me so much I thought I’d come here and start a topic anyone could find (by searching on my TV type) to assert that it works for these devices.
It might not be surprising to people here but it doesn’t work with the typical Android box’s that are plentiful online (nor TVIps, Zidoos or Dune HDs). And as it’s a royal pain to manually turn HDR on with Sony’s I thought people at large, searching, might want some help learning the Vero does that.
I have had no problems with the resolutions displayed.
I’m very familiar with this (I run many virtual machines of Debian derivatives at my home) I had just got into the habit (from seeing it used so many times) of associating Kodi with Android.
At the moment my girlfriend uses my Popcorn Chameleon running such a set up (an abortive attempt to create a open source community supported media player).
I followed this advice -it did seem to improve my picture.
