Vero 4K+ review/first impressions (from a Vero 4K owner)

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

YES! It finally arrived. Two of them, because you know - one might be wormy.

Unboxing was… like nothing else!

No, no that’s a lie. It was a pretty boring unboxing. Quite similar to the Vero 4K unboxing, in fact. Same remote, same power brick (probably - I’ve no idea. I didn’t want to do yoga trying to remove the existing one from my Vero 4K). It’s nice that Sam personally included a special HDMI cable for me… (and everyone else who buys a Vero 4K+).

So, the physical product looks amazing. It’s light-years better looking than the original Vero 4K. I mean, LOOK AT IT next to the original Vero 4K!!! The Vero 4K is on the right. Probably. I think.

IMG_2240
IMG_22403024×4032 2.81 MB

So, let’s get SERIOUS:

1.) Setup is much the same (i.e. the same) as the original Vero 4K. It takes mere seconds. First things first after getting into the main menu. I ran the update to the August build (mine shipped with the July build). Just to keep me on my toes, after rebooting for the update, the Vero 4K+ crashed on startup with the SAD FACE, and - amusingly - switched my OSMC skin back to the OSMC skin it ships with (despite my having switched it to the Kodi skin, wtf?).

Anyway, after crashing it came back up and has worked without issue since.

2.) At this point I did a restore from a USB drive of the backup I made of my Vero 4K minutes earlier. It’s worth noting that it does take a couple of minutes for the restore to even start. You may think nothing has happened, but DO BE PATIENT.

3.) The only things I have installed on my Vero 4K (and now Vero4K+ model) are a few TV apps (ESPN, FOX Sports), Plex Kodi Connect, and the Plex add-on itself. I did notice that thumbnails took a bit of coaxing to reappear. Whether it was a few reboots, or a few manual syncs - but they’re all finally there in both Plex/PKC.

What else?

1.) NO MORE BLUE LED! Hallelujah! Almost worth the price of the upgrade alone (almost). Now the Vero 4K+ is an unassuming box, finally, as it should be. Let me watch my TV without being blinded or stuffing the box somewhere it can’t be seen. Yay!

2.) Speed increase? Uh… ok? I don’t see it. Maybe there are certain circumstances where it’s visible, or maybe it reduces the chances of frame skips/drops in certain outlying situations, but… I don’t see any speed increase on my end. I was (I have to admit) a tad disappointed that scrolling through Plex or Plex Kodi Connect movies etc that the Vero 4K+ can’t maintain 60fps when scrolling through movie posters. It may be a little smoother than the Vero 4K, but… it’s certainly no Apple TV 4K + Plex in terms of silky smooth scrolling.

3.) Gigabit ethernet. OH YES. This is a major improvement. I’m not one for messing with file-system modifications or any of that stuff. I want to turn on the Vero, connect to my Plex server over ethernet, and watch movies. With the Vero 4K (non-+ edition), there’s a TANGIBLE improvement when using the USB->ethernet solution (around 324Mbit). Snappier reads and seeks/chapter selection etc in movies. With the Vero 4K+, it’s even better. It’s noticeable on fast forwards and rewinds, and chapters skip on UHD movies in a flash. Love it. iperf3 reports a consistent 930Mbit speed from my 2014 Mac mini to the Vero 4K+. Yay!

So, overall, if you don’t have a Vero 4K, you should buy one. That goes without saying. If you have a Vero 4K, don’t expect a massive difference unless you love speedy networking. That said, I love love love what the team is doing here, and so for me it’s worth the money just to support the project.

Overall, some slight quirks aside, the Vero 4K+ is still absolutely worth the money. Just think of it as… it’s now better value for money than it was last year!

Cheers, Sam and the OSMC team!

5 Likes
2

Hi,

Thanks for taking the time to post a review.

The eMMC is much faster, which will be notable when using big libraries. This coupled with the faster networking should give you smoother browsing.

Be aware that there was a bug in the August software which would cause high CPU load (and thus a poor out of box experience). Things should be faster after the update.

Don’t worry – that’s harmless, but it’s something I will fix when I get a bit of spare time. There are more pressing issues.

I’ve sent you a PM about some further speed improvements that are possible with a Vero 4K + (but not Vero 4K) and would appreciate your feedback

Cheers

Sam

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Thanks for taking the time to tell us about the magic box.:+1:

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Sam, you say there’s a bug in the August software. What update are you referring to that fixes it? The yet-to-be-released September update?

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It’s fixed in 2018.08-2.

Sam

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How much would this help users who use MySQL on a separate box from the Vero? The only real speedup in that case would be for images getting cached into RAM from the .kodi/userdata/Thumbnails directories, which mostly happens in the background.

And, I’ve found that the skin chosen affects this speed a lot. Actor thumbnails load really slow on Titan, even on my PC, but with a recent 3rd party mod to the dialogVideoInfo.xml file on that skin, they load much, much faster.

Also, how big is a “big” library?

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The eMMC is just a hair under twice as fast.

So MySQL queries will be faster, but you can use mysql show processlist; to see if queries are taking some time and also consider enabling the slow query log.

Kodi queries aren’t optimised, and one day we need to sit down and help them improve some of those queries. Surprisingly, MySQL functionality is still considered experimental despite being used widely.

You will also probably get some performance boosts using Maria over MySQL.

3000 films or more.

@WilliamG sent me a video of what he considers sluggish. It is not related to device performance IMHO. To me it looks vsync related.

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The improvement of gigabit lan over gigabit usb adapter (limited by usb2) might make me upgrade to the Vero 4+… maybe a reduced price on black friday? :smiley:

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If you had the experience of the skin change applied during the set-up wizard process not sticking after the first re-boot, that is a problem I’ve found on every OSMC version since I came on board in January. Not a major problem, but definitely a niggle.

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Received my 4k+ yesterday. Setup went without a hitch. Performance is definitely a big step up from the Rpi3 but then it would be. Lovely bit of kit, smaller than I had imagined. My FLIRC usb works without a hitch so I can use my old, familiar-in-the-dark remote.

One hitch that I have come across is signal cutting out on UHD sources. This is using the HDMI cable that comes with the 4k+ attached direct to my Samsung KS8000. On most occasions when I try to play a UHD rip the TV displays ‘No Signal’ (it does go through sometimes but fails again after a few minutes of playback, almost as if it is failing some kind of ‘handshake’ signal).

I replaced the HDMI with another that I already had and the issue has gone away. Possible the Samsung being a bit picky with cables, I have known it to do that before.

Overall, very very happy with my purchase. I’ll put it through it’s paces properly next week.

1 Like
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I’m upgrading from a Pi3 also…I’m interested to know in what ways is it a step up?

Obviously I know the hardware differences between the 2, but interested to know how this translates to user experience/performance.

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Everything is quicker, more snappy. Browsing the library is slick, videos start quicker, skipping chapters is much quicker. UHD playing is obviously a big difference.

It ticks all the boxes for me.

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Cheers bud…exactly the sort of improvements I’ve been hoping for.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Pis are excellent little devices, but for the money there are bound to be some limitations/drawbacks.

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I’m probably mostly going to be echoing things others have said. I’m also coming from a RPi 3b+ in a custom 3d printed case. I was amazed how small the Vero 4K+ was. I feel like Sam should hire a hand model to get some sense of the scale of the thing. And it is fast. I have Kodi setup with MariaDB and NFS shares (native, not mounted via fstab) running on a Windows 10 machine, and there is a noticeable difference is both the UI response and the time to start for a video. On my Pi I almost got a little buffering when I started a video. There’s basically none from the 4K+. I watched Black Panther in 4K last night (getting a “safe” UHD friendly drive flashed and MakeMKV setup to do that was my other weekend project) with absolutely no issues (well except that I don’t have a 4K TV yet).

I restored my configuration from an OSMC backup of my Pi, so the setup process was pretty painless. I have a couple custom scripts I run, so I did have to reinstall Cron and Python3, but I knew I’d have to do that. The funny thing is that the 4K+ is so fast that a custom script I have to integrate my NextPVR recordings into my Kodi library wasn’t quite working right even though it was fine on the Pi… I had to put a 5 second pause in the script to allow some OS level stuff on the Windows machine to finish for everything to work.

The only caution I would share is that if you want to do IR (at least with a Harmony remote), you may have to spend some time tinkering. I tried a number of different remotes to emulate, and they were all inconsistent in terms of performance. Either I only got remote presses every once in awhile or I got six all at once. I played around with settings on the remote for an hour before I finally just plugged the FLIRC v2 I was using on my Pi into the 4K+ and moved on. I don’t love that the 4K+ has a little wart on the side now, but the FLIRC v2 is sleek enough that I’ll get over it.

Edit: I did some more searching and found a thread that helped me get my Harmony working. I documented what I did in that thread.

Now I need to decide if I’m going to move this to the test Kodi 18 builds. With Kodi in beta and stable on my test equipment, I’m itching to make the leap.

2 Likes
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I’m diving in!
Me want, me want! :heart_eyes:

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do_it

1 Like
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Hey, i too upgraded from Vero4k to the + Version. Gbit Ethernet is awsome. I use MariaDB on my Synology NAS and added NFS Shares via fstab. All Good.
However i notice when entering Movie section with 3600 Movies the Tags HD,4k,SD etc load slowly, only after the time total estimate ran thru (takes like 10 secs) they start to appear. That info doesnt seem to be cached or saved anywhere.
Is there a way todo this ? Im mostly using “recent add movies (last 250)” to get around this.

thx !

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What skin do you use?

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Confluence. I tried osmc, new kodi and others but confluence is for me just right and i can see HD,4k etc Flags right away in list mode - i love that…

You think it might be a skin problem ? Is confluence like old stuff gonna disappear some day ?

cheers,

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Media info is scanned by the scraper, and any time you play the file. It is stored in the database related to the unique file id. As long as your files don’t change, this data is just a lookup into the database.

But, it does depend on how the skin uses the data as far as display speed. Also, Kodi does a terrible job at caching query results from a MySQL/MariaDB database.