I received my first Vero 4K+ this week. I have been reading through a lot of threads on this board for a while. I used Kodi on a Sony TV with android TV installed. And I understand a lot of the basic functions.
I have the Vero 4K hooked up to my tv and attached a 4TB HD to a powered USB-hub attached to the Vero. All files play fine and I know how to access files from another source in my network (a 2010 MacBook Pro).
I am trying to figure out how to transfer files form my MacBook to the HD attached to the Vero. If I understand correctly this is not a big problem and my best bet is to use SMB/Samba. I already had the Mac Samba workaround in place by running the app SMBUp. I need to delve deeper in all the settings and to find the exact IP address my Vero is using.
But reading up on HD filesystems I see that ext4 is recommended. My current HD is formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). If I am not mistaken this is the same as HFS+
Do I understand correctly that HFS+ is read only on the Vero? And that would mean I could not transfer files from my MacBook to the Vero even if I have a working SMB connection?
What would be the best practice be for my setup? I want the HD to be attached to the Vero so I can stream 4K movies with no problem and be able to edit the info on the HD attached (delete/add/edit files) by using my MacBook.
Yes, hfs+ is the filesystem with the worse support under Linux and should be avoided. You should format your drive with ext4 and then install the Samba Server from the App store. Then you can add files from your Mac and also have best performance playing them on the Vero
Thank you for your fast reply.
I was expecting that answer
It means I need to get a new drive first as I do not have space to spare to temporary keep my current files during a reformat to ext4.
I have installed Samba Server on the Vero. I can now access the Vero on my MacBook, but I cannot see the attached drive. Only the four Vero folders: Movies, Music, Pictures and TV Movies.
How do I get to see additional HD? I still have it formatted in HFS+ Can this be the problem?
I accessed the Vero through smb://192.rest of ip address
Second question: how does one format a HD to ext4 without access to a linux machine? Can I format a drive by using the Vero? What be the best file system be if ext4 is not available?
Looks like your Mac is treating Vero as a media server (ie using UPnP). If it’s working properly as a file server, you should be able to see files in vero’s home directory as well as directories. If your drive is HFS, vero won’t be mounting it so you won’t see it through samba either.
Yes, you can, using the commandline. But are there not tools for MacOS to do that?
You might want to choose a filesystem that both Mac and Vero can read and write so you can quickly copy files using the MacBook.
I formatted an older drive to ExFat. I can see this drive on my MacBook when connected to the Vero.
The HFS+ works fine on the Vero but I cannot access it from outside of the Vero. When I get a new HD I will format it to ExFat. It is too big a hassle to use ext4 with a Mac. You have to create a virtual machine or some commercial apps to be able to use ext4 to some extent. For me that is not worth the hassle. I think ExFat will work good enough for me.
Before getting too far I would test transferring some large files from your Mac to the exFat formatted drive connected to your Vero and make sure the files are playable afterwards. I’ve seen posted that Debian to exFat over SMB is slow but works, and I know Win10 fails on large file transfers, but I don’t think i’ve seen anyone post about trying that combo from a Macintosh.
Before I read your post I transferred a 9GB .mkv file. Transfer is slow, but file played perfectly.
Just now tried another file with a size of 13GB and that took 15 minutes to transfer.
What are considered large files? And what is fast/slow transfer?
I have to take into account that the exFat HD connected to a powered USB-hub attached to the Vero is an older 500GB USB 2 drive. Not sure if that can be a bottleneck here.
Any ideas why when using a torrent file on my MacBook and setting the download location to the exFat drive the download speed is very slow? As in 10kb/s slow.
If I format a drive to ext4 will it be visible on my MacBook through the Samba shares? I can see the exFat drive but I cannot see the HFS+ drive attached to the Vero.
But the Vero does see the files on that HFS+ drive because I was able to built the video library and play the 4K movies on that drive.
Those file sizes are well past were a problem would show up if there was one. It would seem that whatever the issue with SMB and exFAT it is isolated to just Windows. Thanks for reporting back on that.
Regarding what is fast/slow transfer that is kind of a relative term. I think generally speaking I would define “slow” as something significantly below what the largest bottleneck is. You transferred that 13GB file at 14.4MB/s. That tells me that your network is running gigabit ethernet okay so on a hardware level your bottleneck is the USB 2.0 port the drive is plugged into. Since that hardware should let you get to at least 30MB/s (someone who actually owns this hardware please correct me if i’m wrong). I would say the exFAT is slow as it seems to be reducing your transfers to maybe half of what they could be. Whether this is a problem is up to you. The ability to make it easily transportable may be of a larger concern.
I’m not going to touch any topic having to do with torrents or OSX.
If you format as ext4 then your Mac will be able to see it over SMB.
Regarding the HFS+ connected to the Vero there is very limited support for that format outside of Apple. This is not unlike ext4 and NTFS having very limited support in OSX. I did a web search and saw that there was ways to install ext4 support on your Mac if you wanted that. Apparently they are not great, but if you just want to be able to directly transfer some files they may be good enough.
Thanks for you reply. I do not mind the time it takes to transfer these files.
I will get a new HD and format it to ext4 using the command line on the Vero. If that works the same (or faster) as this current setup I will keep using ext4. Or have one ext4 and one exFat drive.
I will do some more searching and experimenting with torrenting directly on the Vero by using the Transmission app. Getting files directly on the Vero with a decent speed makes transferring files from Mac to Vero less important.
Loving the Vero 4K by the way. And all the support here!
I use HFS+ formatted disks connected to a Debian server on a Pine64 (which serves files to OSMC on a Raspberry Pi 3). They are read/write in Debian because the disks are not journaled. It’s not possible to format disks like this from the Mac Disk Utility but in Terminal the command diskutil can format disks without journaling and also has an option disableJournal. Run man diskutil in Terminal to see details.
I have never used diskutil disableJournal so I can not guarantee it will do what I expect and that it will not destroy everything on the disk. AS I don’t have a Vero I don’t know if that will make them read/write on the Vero.
Generally, I agree you are better off with ext4, but that can’t be connected directly to a Mac without installing something else which is why I set my disks up like this. It’s a few years ago now, so possibly time to reconsider with new disks.
Thanks for the ideas William. I thought HFS+ was journaled… The correct name for the file system I have is Mac OS Extended (Journaled). I see now that you can have a journaled version or one without.
On another note. While trying to get Transmission working I rebooted my Vero 4k+ and after connecting through SMB I now got to see 2 more folders.
Previously I only could see the folder OSMC and my exFat HD. Now I see those two + EFI + my HFS+ drive.
Thanks. But does this mean the EFI is a partition on the Vero or on one of my attached drives?
I assume I cannot do anything with/on it, but I am simply curious
There is no EFI on vero. It looks like at some stage your HFS+ was formatted for booting. The EFI partition would be hidden to most OSs. It’s quite small so can be ignored.
