Vero 4K+ Still Usb 2.0?

Does this device run kodi?
Does come the support level offered by OSMC?
Will it receive updates for 3 years+ ?

Thanks Tom.

The Xiaomi doesn’t even have Ethernet.

It would be interesting to know how the HDD is formatted. The HEVC decoder delivers better performance than the H264 decoder.

If the other device meets your needs, buy that. We don’t compete on price point. Other devices don’t compete on functionality or quality.

You cannot produce a Vero 4K + with $52 as a BoM.

4 Likes

Well you referred to “on default” and by default it doesn’t buffer local media.
BTW “on default” for the Vero4K the buffer is bigger than 20MB

HDD is WD 2.5" 500GB SATA, in USB 3.0 enclosure. When connected over USB 3.0, it working at 70-90MB/s speed.

I have bought a Vero 4k and till now I never experienced issues with 4k hevc files, I watched the entire planet earth 2 series and several movies (some in h264 too) without stuttering, so something else must be at play here.

TBH, vero4k is not the best choice for a media server. 4k high bitrate fanatics ought to be looking at devices with SATA to store their media rather than hanging USB drives off little kodi boxes. It’s that use case that the gigabit upgrade is aimed at.

3 Likes

And that is exactly why I am quite disappointed in the upcoming Vero device. It is the 4th iteration of the Vero and still it’s hardware is purely selected to manage (perfect) playback.

Fact is, Vero and OSMC has made Kodi/mediacenter much more accessible to a large number of people. People that will never understand they have to buy a Synology and a Vero.

I am disappointed because OSMC and the Vero could very well be the central storage unit for lots of homes that don’t require stuff like Synology. Actually I believe lots of people already use it like that.

Now that I live in a house with GB ethernet wall points in every room, GB dual band WiFi and 200mbit/s internet, the bottleneck in my house is the Vero, which contains all my media including 400GB/17 years of photos/videos, 120GB of FLAC CD backups and about 500 GB of TV shows and movies. And about 30GB of documents and other stuff.

It works, I have no need for a separate NAS. But the USB attached HDD is a USB 3.1 version and the Vero maxes out at 30-40MB/s like any other USB2.0 device. So I just need to be patient sometimes. However, if the new Vero would have supported faster ethernet AND faster USB, I would by one instantly and replace the RPi3 in my bedroom for the old Vero.

With only faster ethernet, the bottleneck is still there.

Of course for media playback, both GB ethernet and USB3 are not necessary. But by now it should be clear people have more needs than just pure playback.

Nah. That is wrong. The 2.5" drives are not that fast in sustained reads. I got plenty of these, and migrated my NAS from 2.5" Drives to 3.5" Drives as I didn’t get enough speed out of it for several VERO devices to pull data for HD movies.
Try using an extrernal SSD Drive instead of a Spinning one, and I bet it will work fine.

The Vero is a media playback device. It is not a NAS. The CPU won’t be able to handle it at high speeds anyway. You want a decent NAS, get yourself a HP Microserver gen8/gen10 - make sure there is a fast CPU inside (the gen8 you can upgrade to a Xeon CPU as I did) put 4 fast disks inside and you’ll get 380MBytes/s read speed with spinning disks and if configured correctly, you can even bond both ethernet devices or add a 10Gbps network card to it. I bet you’ll get more speed with SSD Drives.

Would you configure an Amazon-Prime Stick to handle content/Video files to other devices? No? So don’t finger point to the Vero Devices which do exactly what they are supposed to do the best way possible. Deliver Video Playback from various data-sources.
If you want some thing that does “it” all, buy a super-fastr Hardware and put Windows on it. Windows does everything you want, but bad.
I prefere to have a nicely tuned environment using Vero devices.

We are already working on a storage solution with good OSMC integration, but it doesn’t come in the form of a Vero.

Sam

5 Likes

Honestly, that’s an issue I find very hard to understand… Being able to use the Vero as an NAS/media sharing device would be nice, indeed. Having GBit internet in the countryside would also be nice… But you can’t have it all.
I prefer having a seperate device for sharing my files and media - an actual NAS - and a very decent device which will do the playback as expected. This, the playback side of things, is what the Vero does and what it is for.

There has been some improvement now also due to feedback: the GBit ethernet port (at the same price as before, keep that in mind!). Be happy with it for now. Also consider that hardware improvements are always an investment financially and time-wise and OSMC is not a big company (a big company would probably not listen to feedback or demands for hardware improvements anyway)… Or ask yourself this question: Why is the Vero doing what it does so perfectly and why are many people not very happy with other hardware? That should answer the question.

What I’m a bit sad about: There’s an improvement which has been asked for for some time by many users who were quite vocal here on the forum and as soon as the improvement hits the market, there’s complaint in the form of: Why is this not there, why is it missing this, why is it missing that?
The Vero is a very good playback device and that has always been its main advertised purpose. Don’t complain about the lack of a feature with a device that has never been made for any other purpose than playback in the first place :wink:

5 Likes

I agree with all of the above. But note I never complained about a missing gigabit port because the current Vero already has a very good 100mbit port which is more than enough for playback.

I guess I what would really love is a different type of product. Indeed a light NAS (HP Microserver or Synology and Raid features are all overkill for my needs), for example with ability to insert a 2.5" 2TB disk with a high speed connection like SATA and a fast external port to add more storage. Ofcourse also with a faster ARM based SoC to support this.

I would definitely be willing to pay €199 easily for such a product.
But as a playback device, I do understand that is totally overkill (both in hardware as price).

Perhaps a Vero 4K Ultra Premium Extended Plus as a secondary product next to the normal Vero :slight_smile:

I think we are all have been spoiled with the current Vero 4K… and now want more :slight_smile:

NAS are globally overpriced, for what type of device it is, and for things it can do. And as long, as people will buy those overpriced things, it will stay overpriced.
I have about 6 or 7 3.5" SATA HDD’s where all my movie collection are stored. I would like central storage, but with any of common NAS available, its impossible.

Just simple 2-bay NAS cost about 80euros…4-bay is about 150 and 8-bay for 300 and more. Insane.

If you wanna to build your own NAS, then just some 4-bay NAS-like cases only (with some “shuffles” on front, where HDD to put in), can be for 100euros and more…for what?? Just for metal case. Not to mention 6-bay, or 8-bay cases, costing even more.

I just wanna a 8-bay case, with enough performance for file transfers over 1Gbit LAN without bottlenecking, where I can put my HDD’s, which can make them accessible in home LAN.
No fancy OS, just some minimal Linux (like OSMC’s) for aministration via terminal.
No apps, no RAID, or anything making it expensive. Powered by laptop brick PSU. Max RRP about 100eur.

Maybe Sam is working on it, as he mentioned before? :slight_smile:

That is clearly not a problem. As I stated before, when I connect that HDD to my PC over USB 3.0, it will do 70-90MB/s read/write speed without problems. Even for longer time, for example, when copying 50GB of files to it.

I can agree to this… Not being sad anymore now :wink::rofl:

You cannot compare a PC and a Vero device. But have you tested the read speed on the Vero device, coupled with the CPU utilization? That what I’d do first.

Can you please advice how to do it? I am not much skilled in Linux.
But because vero have only USB2.0, it will be limited to about 30MB/s speed.

Even when I tested those high bitrate test files, CPU utilization was about 60%, memory 60-70%.
h265 HW acceleration was working. But video was stuttering. From internal storage, it plays OK.

My external HDD is formatted to NTFS, because of need to connect it to windows pc. Yes, there is some performance penalty (encountered it before on old HTPC), but I think it is not as big.

However, my main concern, why Vero should have USB3.0, is for data transfer over gigabit LAN to external drive connected over USB3.0 to it. Without the need to connect HDD somewhere else for transfer large files, because of slow USB 2.0.

Read-Speed can be done easily. Log into the Vero4k using putty/ssh, and use lsblk to identify the partition of your external disk with:

osmc@osmc4k:~$ lsblk 
NAME         MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
mmcblk0      179:0    0 14.7G  0 disk 
mmcblk0boot0 179:32   0    4M  0 disk 
mmcblk0boot1 179:64   0    4M  0 disk 
mmcblk0rpmb  179:96   0  512K  0 disk 

shows you which partitions exist. Make sure you choose the partition belonging to your external USB disk.
Use the hdparm to make a read-test of your disks with:

osmc@osmc4k:~$ sudo hdparm -tT /dev/mmcblk0

/dev/mmcblk0:
 Timing cached reads:   1582 MB in  2.00 seconds = 790.42 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads: 212 MB in  3.00 seconds =  70.66 MB/sec

Note that USB2.0 is able to handle more speed than 30mBytes 480Mbps/8 = 60MBytes/s
Here we see that the internal disk can read data with 70mBytes/s. Which is quite OK.
USB should reach around 55MBytes when formatted as ext4fs (remowing the overhead etc.). NTFS/ExtFat is way slower. So in case you use that, forget the speed.

1 Like

That’s the same as saying your WiFi router can do 1200mbps because it says so on the package :wink:
USB is CPU intensive and has its own overhead. Getting more than 35MB/s via USB2 would be impressive. Lots of x86 systems dont even achieve that. But I will definitely do some testing, thanks for the tips.

FUSE filesystems (NTFS) are also very CPU intensive and will kill performance