Today I gave up

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

FAfter working for three days to get a stable setup with the Vero 4k - I gave up.

Even though the Vero 4k in the moment appears to be the best of the Kodi bunch, I still consider this not ready yet for prime-time.

Besides the audio issues (which have been fixed in the meantime) I ran across the following problems:

  • switching skins changed the internal settings of the player (sometimes certain settings only
    appeared grayed out) - these are SKINS, they should not touch the settings at all!

  • playing H.265 files only starts the sw player (which of course cannot handle this), even
    though all hw accelerations are turned on

  • repeating crashes of the system (then waiting for the watchdog to bring it back on)

  • when I wanted to correct wrong read scraper data, I could not do that from the normal
    “Movies” menu, but had to go back to the “media” section and fix it there. With a lot of
    changes required this is extremely time consuming

  • the scrapers always stopped when finding too much delay in accessing scrapers - and did not
    restart - also found no direct command to get that going again. After a few seconds it
    stopped again

  • the keyboard was going back from German to English, even though I changed the layout in
    the rc.local initializations. The setting for the locale settings had no effect at all

  • lots of little quirks, when starting and shutting down the box (console output), switching
    resolutions, at the end or the beginning of a movie …

… etc.

I will however still keep the box and revisit the sw in a year or so. Maybe until then this has stabilized.

I continue using my Dune HD 4k solo, which is in comparison rock solid. It does not have all the bells and whistles and beautiful user interfaces as the Kodi boxes, but it has not failed me a single time for more than a year. It plays everything with audio and video ALWAYS correct.
This is the minimum I expect from a media player. It cannot handle HDR nicely and also 4k only up to 30frames/s and it cannot zoom nicely. But I can live with that.

What I hope to see in the future for the Vero 4k are the following points:

  • absolutely stable audio and video playback
  • 3D MVC playback
  • vertical shift option for the image also when using HW acceleration
  • stable Bluetooth keyboard connectivity also for non-english layouts
  • no crashes anymore. I mean NONE under normal usage conditions

I really appreciate all the work Sam does for this device and am really positive that this may become one of the really good media players in a while. But currently I just do not have the time to make the media player a “hobby”. This must work without problems.

BTW: the next generation of Dune Neo players is still in a much worse state. The Vero 4k is much more advanced and usable than these boxes. But I still hope that either the Vero 4k or the new Dune Neo boxes - both using the new AMlogic processor - will manage to tame that beast in the future.

I wish you all good luck and much fun with the Vero - I will be back.

2

Thanks for the post. I’ll reply with in detail shortly.

3

All 3 of these are purely Kodi issues. I have weirdness when switching skins on Kodi running on Windows…settings get changed, etc. “Skins” in Kodi are not static things…they run code, and they have bugs.

Same for the scraping timeouts and changing movie data. Some skins allow access to fixing scraped data from the “Movies” area, but not many.

4

I am aware that these are kodi issues, but the whole player is centered around kodi. I have to treat this as an integral part of the device. For me the overall functionality is important - I don’t really care which parts fault it is.

5

The various parts of Kodi are maintained by hundreds of people, and almost all of it is unchanged by anything done by OSMC maintainers. In particular, if you have a problem with a skin that isn’t the OSMC skin, then you need to address the skin maintainer. The same is true for any add-on that doesn’t have an OSMC-modified version. You would get this same response from any hardware or OS vendor when you download a program they don’t control and then run it on the hardware.

It’s funny to see people complaining that the £99 Vero only does 95% of what devices costing 3-6x as much do. Note that most people have zero stability issues with playback of a very wide variety of content. Sure, there are a few things that might not work perfectly, but the system doesn’t crash. Compared to devices costing about the same, the Vero 4K gives about 150% of the features with better stability.

6 Likes
6

Hi,

We are always trying to make OSMC and Vero the best it can be. You don’t strike me as negative at all, but rather someone who isn’t happy with the device yet. I can completely understand that if it doesn’t work for your setup yet.

I’ve checked your posts and can see that you have a limited post history. We like to deal with any concerns that are raised as promptly as possible. It’s always best to raise problems as they come up rather than compound them, as by then specifics aren’t usually addressed with the detail that they deserve.

There were some playback issues if you updated in the last day or two, but these are now resolved and a simple update when prompted will find you on good terms.

Some of your issues, such as crashes, can be solved very quickly with a simple debug log. This can be done via My OSMC, and doesn’t require any complex know-how to perform.

You can have these today.

This is harder and not yet available.

Unfortunately scrapers are not hosted by us, and as such, we do not have any control over them. It depends on the scraper you are using; but you may find that subscribing for an API key will significantly improve scraping performance. This is not necessary – but it can improve scraping speeds when you are building up an initial library of several thousand films.

A year ago, users had problems with the Kodi add-on repository. We now host this on OSMC infrastructure as a result. We’re not averse to taking responsibility for hosting when necessary; but hosting a scraper currently is tricky due to a lack of API access. Then there’s another question. As you haven’t named which scraper you’re using, we may not have helped you by hosting a scraper

Most of your issues are fixed in today’s update. The very few remaining can be fixed easily with a bit more information.

Let me know if you’re happy to work on this and I can personally help you resolve the issues that you still experience.

You can look through @nabsltd’s post history to see that he has also experienced issues with OSMC in the past. Hopefully he’s now a bit happier, and I’m sure you can be too.

Cheers,

Sam

1 Like
7

Hi Sam,

I understood from the previous entries, that I should try working only with the OSMC skin, as this is what is supported by you? This is somehow contradicting the purpose of being much more flexible in the GUI and configuration options for the media player, but I am willing to try this for a limited time. Please note that I am willing to test this - not to debug this, when it is exceeding simple settings. For me, such a device is something to work with and not to work on.

I am very much aware how difficult it is to support horde of third party devices connected to your box - all of them just following more or less sometimes not fully specified “standards”. I really appreciate that, though it looks to me very much like Sisyphos work, which will never find an end.

9

I can understand your frustration, but i´m using the vero since june 2017 and the player will be better and better - the last two days an update makes much trouble but this isn´t the normal procedure. Stay patient and give it a chance… i use also an himedia q5 pro for 3d iso support yet, will switch to the vero when the full 3d support is ready to go! The q5 has some problems with 4k playback and other things and after very long time these are not solved, the reaction from the support is poor! Also the NVidia Shield, problems with 24p support on many A/V Receiver aren´t solved after TWO years! So what i mean, the community here and Sam´s support is fast and they do their best!
Sorry, i´m from germany, my english isn´t very good…

10

Thanks for the supportive words for Sam and the community! I can assure you as well that the problems of the last days are not the usual case… Everything should be working as before now and we’re back to working on other things for future updates.

@MikeDelta, don’t apologize for your English, it’s very fine! :wink:

11

Understood. We have made the process of uploading logs (if something does go wrong) simple via My OSMC.

I’d suggest grabbing the latest version of OSMC from Download - OSMC, updating and then revisiting and see what issues you experience.