Vero 4K General Discussion

[Fandy_Backers]

Then i buy one right away. yessss, thanks for the info!

[sam_nazarko]

@chamelious

Oh no, you’re right there. And i DO prefer osmc to android, so i’m still considering it and may well just go for it

You will get a good ROI especially over 5 years. And OSMC is coming a long way each year. We have a lot planned for the next year and Vero 4K users will be the first to see these exciting features.

[sam_nazarko]

@Fandy_Backers

Maybe i didn’t get the right information yet, but is the Vero 4K based on the OSMC debian Jessie type or android?I hope the 1e option, because i need all the specs of the Vero 4K with the OSMC debian Jessie OS variant!

Please can you confirm this? Because i already have the VPN feature working with a RPi2 beautifully!Has that box also the abillity of dual boot to android? or just OSMC? Because i read somewhere before that you can switch between them with a button?

OSMC is Debian based. Our flagship product will always run Debian first, and Android as a possibility later.

[Fandy_Backers]

i already bought one! yeahh!

i also want to know on what chip is that 4k box based on?

[chamelious]

Cool- I bought one.

[thansen_dk]

@sam_nazarko
What SoC is the new Vero 4K based on?

[anon9473046]

I’m thinking of upgrading my Rpi2 to a Vero box.
At the moment, I need a usb powered hub to connect my external hard drive (2TB My Passport USB3). With Vero, will I also need that or does Vero output enough power to keep the drive running without any issues?

Thanks,

[sam_nazarko]

Hi – there is not an easy answer to this unfortunately, because it depends on the requirements of the hard disk. One hard drive worked in my testing, two will not, without a stronger power supply (more amps, not volts).

So I would not want to make any guarantees, particularly if you already need a power supply, as Raspberry Pi will output 1.5A (max_usb_current).

We are exploring the possibility of manufacturing a high performance USB hub in the future as there has been demand for it,

Sam

[Duncan]

As a Systems Administrator I can confirm this. Vero 1 had 10/100/1000. H264 1080p or a very high bitrate 720p could literally hang the video playback. Had to use ethtool to set 100 auto negotiate. Not all consumers know how to do this, things like SSH/Bash/scripting/vi adding the command on start-up.

Also keep in mind that the coming years there will be a shift from H264 to H265, H265 uses about half the bitrate of H264.

@chamelious 200 mbps files? That would be a 72 Gb H264 mkv?

[sam_nazarko]

We played up to 600Mbps clips for demoing and testing the hardware. I don’t consider this typical however and don’t believe it will be the norm for a long, long time.

Gigabit Ethernet would be nice, as we could’ve ticked that box, but having gone down this path before, we have seen issues that we would have never expected (flow control).

Sam

[Duncan]

I agree @sam_nazarko a 100 mbps Ethernet port should be enough for the foreseeable future.

[danfer]

@sam_nazarko can you say something about the performance increase (Vero 2 vs. Vero 3) [I know it depends on the scenario, but I just want to get a feeling. Has the “performance” grown 5% or 50%?]

[virchy]

@sam_nazarko What chroma subsampling does support HEVC encoding? Only 4:2:0? Or 4:4:4 and 4:2:2 are supported to?

[Painkiller88]

What exactly means 4k ready?

Does the device support full 4k UHD up to 60hz, HDR, Dolby Vision?

HD-Audio means also DTS:X, Dolby Atmos?

And it would be cool to know exactly what CPU it is and what Mali GPU.

Thanks

[sam_nazarko]

@danfer

@sam_nazarko can you say something about the performance increase (Vero 2 vs. Vero 3) [I know it depends on the scenario, but I just want to get a feeling. Has the “performance” grown 5% or 50%?]

As you already imagined, this depends on the workload on the device. IO bound operations should be much improved, as we now use eMMC storage. This provides really improved random write and read speed to the internal storage.

Video decoding capabilities (VPU) are also very improved: hence 4K playback and support for 10-bit HEVC and VP9.

Graphics performance is improved as well as CPU performance and tests (3DMark for example) show about a 1.5x improvement. Synthetic benchmarks rarely reflect real world performance, so we don’t use these numbers to represent the product. Simply put, you should find it fast, and we are exploring bringing a minimal desktop environment to take advantage of that.

@virchy

@sam_nazarko What chroma subsampling does support HEVC encoding? Only 4:2:0? Or 4:4:4 and 4:2:2 are supported to?

Vero 4K will decode 4:2:0, 4:4:4 and 4:2:2.

Output (and whether it looks good) depends on your TV’s capabilities.

echo 2160p24hz420 > /sys/class/display/mode

could be used to adjust the video mode temporarily. It can be made persistent with a simple command line change, but we found that chroma doesn’t always look good depending on the display. We’ll try and pick sane defaults, but of course things will be tunable. It may not be possible for us to find a one-size-fits-all for this.

@Painkiller88

What exactly means 4k ready?

Does the device support full 4k UHD up to 60hz, HDR, Dolby Vision?

HD-Audio means also DTS:X, Dolby Atmos?

And it would be cool to know exactly what CPU it is and what Mali GPU.

Atmos and DTS:X work. We know people have been after this for a while. No Dolby Vision.

HDR is supported, but may not always look good on your TV.

Vero 4K will do 4K60 decoding. You will need an HDMI 2.0 TV to get that output, as HDMI 1.4 is capped at 4K30. The device features a Quad Core A53 running at 1.6Ghz and a 5-core Mali-450MP GPU.

Sam

[Smurphy]

Just ordered it

[Smurphy]

@sam_nazarko

This depends on demand.

We will probably do this if enough people want it, and we would offer an Android release that boots from SD card. However there is no initial Android release today.

I would rather see a decently implemented Netflix app or so running on the Vero natively.
reason I don’t like Android, it brings so much unneeded overhead (this in terms of software and apps running all the time).

[Thijs]

I would like to see this too but Netflix only allows 1080p and higher on Widevine Level 1 DRM certified devices if i am correct (Wetek Hub for example). So if you could get it to run natively (not Android) on the Vero 4K it would only do crap quality.

@sam_nazarko will the Vero 4K be Widevine Level 1 in Android?

[sam_nazarko]

No – our main focus is on OSMC, so we haven’t gone through Widevine. Doing this would make the device less customisable. For example, we wouldn’t be able to allow people to reinstall OSMC on their device and we would have to lock things down a lot, which is antithetical to the aims of OSMC.

[Thijs]

Thanks for the clarification!