Vero 4k - just received mine today, have seen a few issues

I’m a long-time XBMC/Kodi user (XBMC on PC hardware, then on RPi 1 (Sam’s distro that eventually became OSMC - thanks, Sam!) and now on Vero 4k.

Although I sometimes lack patience setting up gear at home, I’m a 20-year+ Unix/linux sysadmin and developer so I can usually get everything working.

I ordered my Vero 4k last week, received it (in Canada) today, unboxed it and plugged it in. I’m providing my experience so far here to potentially help others. Here’s how it has gone:

Plugged in Vero 4k, powered up and the remote wouldn’t work at the setup screen. I switched the bluetooth receiver to the other USB port and then it worked fine. It’s possible that the receiver wasn’t plugged in properly the first time (but unlikely) and also possible that one USB port it dead (highly unlikely). Anyway, the other port worked and I was off and running.

Got mostly set up (I’ve configured Kodi from scratch many, many times since the RPi 1 days), went to add my SMB shares (samba on Debian 7) but couldn’t see them. After some searching, finally found that I had to edit ~osmc/.smb/smb.conf to let the client on the Vero use SMB1.

Next, I had noticed that CEC didn’t work on the Vero (works on all 3 of my RPis) – the CEC service complained at each boot that it couldn’t see anyone to talk to. Googling for that pointed out that the HDMI cable that ships with the Vero 4k doesn’t pass the CEC signals! I switched back to my older cable and sure enough, it started working.

Any of these issues could have caused somebody else to rebox the Vero and ship it right back for a refund. The “CEC desn’t work with the included cable” issue is especially maddening. Any idea how that has happened and what can be done to correct it?

…Steve

Hi Steve,

I’m very sorry to hear you’ve experienced problems with your Vero 4K[quote=“Steve_van_der_Burg, post:1, topic:38051”]
USB port it dead (highly unlikely). Anyway, the other port worked and I was off and running.
[/quote]

Try plugging a keyboard in to the dead USB port.

What I suspect has happened:

  • The device took a few seconds to pair with the remote.
  • Hotplugging doesn’t always work reliably with Kodi, so a restart of Kodi was needed. But swapping USB will also work.

Yes – we’ve made changes in line with security recommendations after WannaCry.

Sounds like you just might have received a bad cable.

Possibly, however:

  • A lot of our users don’t use Samba. For those that do, most use Windows. If we hadn’t made the SMB changes, then SMB1 would stay working, but anyone on Windows 7 and Windows 10 would be unable to access shares. This would likely cause more of a fuss. With Kodi v18, this issue should be resolved. I would strongly recommend discontinuing the use of SMB1 on your server if you can; particularly as there have been a number of Samba CVEs over the past year (Debian is affected). You are running a very old, and unsupported operating system. OSMC focuses on compatibility with modern, supported operating systems.
  • The remote should be fine now. Pairing can take a few seconds. A couple of users have experienced problems with the remote not instantly working out of the box but have been happy to power cycle
  • The HDMI cable usually works (usually: failure rate of about 1 in 3000).When you’re shipping the number of devices we’re shipping, you’re going to get the odd bad HDMI cable.

Let me know what we can do to fix things for you. We’re working on improving the out of box experience. Please also check the status of the USB cable.

I’ve also raised a credit on your account for any future order to hopefully make up for this situation

Sam

@Steve_van_der_Burg as a sysadmin you should be read up on exploits for linux, the wannacry exploit was covered pretty much everywhere.

SMB1 isnt really a recommended standard anymore since most modern linux system has gotten a whole lot better most of my system doesnt even use SMB2 that OSMC uses running on version 3 since the kernel itself has gotten support for it and both of my nas has support for it.

So might be time for you to actually research those things so you can secure your systems.

WannaCry exploits a set of flaws in Microsoft’s implementation of the SMB1 protocol. Since these are implementation flaws rather than structural flaws in the protocol itself, Linux systems cannot be automatically infected, but can be if manually installed. This is true regardless of if the systems are running Samba, Wine, or any other Windows-emulation layer.

Statistics! Just for the record, my Vero 4K HDMI cable also didn’t work, so I reverted to the old one (from my Pi3), which did work. In the case of small items like cables, I suspect that very few people will return them if they don’t work; they just try another one and, if that works, the cable from the Vero goes into the box of bits.

Based on a sample of one (me) I’d guess that the failure rate is probably higher than 1 in 3000. :wink:

Same here. I didn’t care since I have plenty of hdmi cables.

And btw, my experience with vero 4k is great.
I use my tv remote with cec. 4K, 10 bit, HDR, HEVC, DTS-HD, TrueHD…

This device is a small beast. I hope in future it could do Dolby Vision passthrough.

I think there’s an issue with surround lpcm, but I’m sure it will get handled in the near future.

Sam, thanks for the response. I will check the other USB port today to make sure that it is working.

As for SMB1 and Wannacry and Debian 7, I agree (and even enforce!) all of those positions at work (on a 35,000-user, 20,000-device network), but at home on my small, controlled network (where no Windows servers are running) my approach is different.

Well you might not consider it a Windows server but unfortunately Samba has inherited all the flaws from Windows

You might find better throughput and simpler configuration with NFS.
Samba becomes a pain particularly with Active Directory involved and even in OSMC
we’re often fighting with it. The approach to its maintenance in Debian leaves much to be
desired…

Sometimes. Usually when people have paid £119 for something though, they will quite rightly complain when something isn’t 100% as expected; and more so than those that have paid a lot less.

I’ll take a few HDMI cables out and check them.

Sam