The remote that came with the Vero 4K+ uses the same metal dome switches that the current model remote does. I think that kind of switch can break in over time and get a little easier to push and soften its sound a little, so you might be experiencing more of a break in than a noticeable difference in the design. I have both models and tested them side by side clicking countless times doing distance testing. Honestly the only way I could keep track of which one I was using was to look at the labels I stuck to the back of mine.
If you are experiencing an issue where button presses are not registering and it does not change with distance (ie it misses button presses even a 1m distance) then I would suggest that you may have been unfortunate enough to get one with a defect and I would suggest to contact support@osmc.tv and enquire about an exchange.
Thanks - how do I know if it is the problem with the dongle (as a lot of others are experiencing) or the remote itself? pair the 4+ one to it?
Both my remotes are most notably different feeling in the clicky department.
Unless your 4K+ remote is less than around nine months old it won’t pair with the receiver that inside your Vero V. The Vero V remote should work at a one meter distance without an issue regardless of the situation from my testing. If it can’t, and you have tried a new battery in it, and re-paired by holding down home and OK, then I think that is about as best as one can do to determine if there is a defect or not. Testing is somewhat limited with the dongle being internal and taking the box apart voiding your warranty.
My new Vero V has exactly the same problems with the remote control. Can you please send the new dongles to the German Distributor Welectron so that the buyers affected by the malfunction can be supplied. Obviously it is a type of faulty design and therefore a warranty claim.
I just ordered one from Welectron myself and didn’t yet know about this issue. Will just not accept it at the door and have it sent back, unless we will get warranty on this for sure, even if bought from another store like Welectron.
Just trying to be sure I get a good working unit, without having to spend money or have to go through hoops and all that to get it solved. Then just refusing the package is easiest for me.
Nothing more frustrating than a remote that responds intermittently.
Just my two cents: I wouldn’t go that far. This remote business is irritating at times for sure, but in my experience (I’ve had the Vero V for about three months now) this is a superb device. I’d much rather press a key again at times than not having the V-V at all.
I still want it, but will be ordering it after things are clear about it and solved. Remote needs to work without hitches for me, one of the biggest annoyances for me.
Only reason not to worry, is if you use a Harmony remote, it will not be an issue. I think it shouldn’t because I think it uses Bluetooth, but want to know for sure.
The issue with the remote that people are discussing in this thread only affect the OSMC remote. The issues are between the internal USB receiver dongle and the supplied remote. These issues do not affect how any other remote control works be that be IR, Bluetooth, or some option that has a USB receiver of its own (such as earlier model OSMC remote). To be clear, this isn’t an issue that affect most users. Although there are people who in their environments and particular configurations have a very limited range, in others it works without issue at 12 meters. The upgraded dongle that is to be released soon has a larger antenna and is more resilient to RF interference but that only helps people who are actually having an issue.
Based on sales figures, this post and emails it’s looking like about 1 in 450 users are affected. We don’t want to encourage users to open their device up unnecessarily, so we won’t supply replacement dongles for each order as standard.
It’s also better environmentally to supply these on a case by case basis.
Sorry to hear that. You can get in touch with WElectron about this matter.
Unfortunately they are not an official seller any more and are selling off their existing stock, so I don’t think they will get these in.
As explained previously we will make these available at cost shortly as well as have an offer for affected customers. We don’t consider it a fault when there is interference from USB3, it’s the nature of how USB3 is designed and implemented and this affects other products too, like Raspberry Pi.
Fortunately the new dongle does yield a better range and is less subject to interference.
Slightly off topic, but then again, not fully. You have noted them as official resellers, what will happen if my Vero V will have issues while I bought it from them?
I wanted to buy it from the CZ pishop, but that shop didn’t ship to my country and buying from the UK has other issues with warranty and customs fees and the likes.
I’m just wondering how you can be so, sorry, petty for a mistake that apparently you are responsible for. You wrote “it’s the nature of how USB3 is designed and implemented…”. With this knowledge, you have apparently still created the remote control system as it is now and in some cases poorly working. I belong to one of the “1 in 450 users are affected”. In addition to the 220 euros, I also pay also at cost as well for the “RemoteFixDongle” Don’t forget the shipping costs.
Just for context the OSMC remote uses radio waves. This provides benefits including faster response times allows it to work without being line of sight. USB 3 communication happens at such a high frequency it frequently causes interference across a wide swath of frequencies including all the ones licenced for this type of application. If you want a place to start referencing the issue the following document may provide enlightening…
The amount of interference with the dongle from testing seems to be highly variable with the device that is plugged in and where it is physically located. This issue is not new, exclusive to the OSMC remote, nor is it easily mitigated when you have the source of the interference in a close physical location to the device you want to operate inside of the noisy radio spectrum.
Obviously the ideal would be for their to be zero issues in all situations but that is easier said than done. It isn’t like cordless phones, cell phones, wifi, bluetooth, etc. don’t have range challenges depending on environmental factors including in some cases due to USB 3 communication interference.
Your frustration is understandable. I’m sure I would be frustrated as well if I was in the same situation. But, as an objective observer (at least I think I am. I don’t work for OSMC) I think too harsh of a criticism of the situation is maybe a bit ill placed. The dongle that is currently in the Vero V is the exact same dongle that had been shipping with the Vero 4K+ and being sold separately for about nine months. In that time I recall exactly one, and only one, post that brought to light an issue with range and USB 3 interference (on a RPi 4) with that dongle. Efforts have been made to rectify the situation, and nobody has made any effort to try to curtail any discussion on the topic. What more really could you ask for?
WElectron have chosen not to stock the product anymore due to pricing issues. I’m not sure why as we offer favourable pricing to all of our resellers at the same prices. Conversely, we’d like pricing to be more in line with our other resellers and better handling of warranty conditions. But customers that have purchased OSMC products through WElectron are not going to be left behind. I will cover the cost of the dongle personally myself.
Regarding shipping to Germany – customs is a very simple process and you will receive a bill (lower than the WElectron sale price). You get a phone call or email and pay it online and it is delivered to your door. It can however take a few days longer.
Warranty is handled directly by us, and replacements / repairs are not taxed. You could consider this for future orders.
I understand your complaint entirely. By the sounds of it, you are using a USB3 attached device. It could very well be the case that the problem you are experiencing isn’t caused by the OSMC remote dongle at all, but the peripheral you are using. If you have poorly shielded cables or the device itself is not shielded well, it isn’t going to be an OSMC problem directly.
If you read this thread, you’ll see that we’re not solely to blame. There are some methods to mitigate this scenario as highlighted before and we will have a post on the Wiki shortly once the dongle is available.
Anyone that has reported an issue here that have ordered from us or a reseller to this date will receive a replacement dongle free of charge. I will put that system in place shortly. It may take a bit longer for replacement dongles to be received by our resellers.
For future reports, it will be necessary to purchase the dongle at cost to prevent unnecessary production and ordering of the dongle.
And with newer batches, this will soon become a thing of the past.
I’m glad that we can improve this. As soon as we found this limiting factor with USB3, I’ve not been sleeping soundly and I won’t until I see the first confirmations that things are as they should be. That should be very soon.
I am very grateful to the excellent OSMC team who identified this issue promptly as well as their vigorous testing strategy.
In short: shit happens, but we’ll fix it. We’re fixing other manufacturer problems too in the process…
USB3 is definitely a problem for certain RF devices.
It is well documented by many companies over many devices (Intel, AMD, etc).
So USB3 interfering with RF is not an OSMC or Vero issue.
USB3 was a very popular feature request, I personally requested it more than once in various threads, so it was expected to be there in the next Vero iteration.
Had it not been, I’d imagine that many people would have raised hell about it’s omission.
I even mentioned in a thread in this forum, well before the V was announced, that the addition of USB3 could introduce RF issues.
I have to imagine Sam and team knew well about all this and did everything they could to test for it.
The Vero V is a great product!
Nothing is perfect and the fact that Sam is willing to fix issues instead of ignoring customers (companies like Nintendo come to mind) is very promising.
Personally, I feel that the issue is more so in the dongle and it’s placement than the USB3.
From my own personal testing, the V dongle lacks the range my old 4K+ dongle had.
I have tested with and without USB3 drives plugged in, different orientations and placements, etc.
Some methods work better than others and everyone’s mileage is going to vary because everyone’s setups are different, but one constant for me is the 4K+ dongle and remote work flawlessly regardless of my configuration or placement.
The funny thing about that is the the 4k+ dongle is plugged in externally right next to the USB3 port, and behind it too from my view from my couch, so you would thing if the USB3 port or cable is causing interference it would do it more so there than to the dongle plugged in inside, but it doesn’t.
That’s why I think the issue is more so in the dongle and remote than in the USB3 port (not to excuse the USB3 entirely obviously).
Unfortunately the design choice to put the dongle inside the V limits options to rectify the issue without one voiding their warranty.
I know an RF dongle can coexist with the USB3 on the Vero V since it does for me right now with my old 4K+ dongle and remote, so hopefully these new dongles Sam is getting work just as well as the old 4K+ dongles.
And if the new dongles can be paired with your existing Vero V remote (I don’t see why it wouldn’t be able to) then that’s a pretty simple fix.
Affected users just need to get new dongles, which by the sounds of it Sam will provide to us at his cost, then plug them in and pair them.
I really look forward to these new dongles working and being a sound fix for everyone because it’s the only real blemish on this otherwise perfect device.
Keep up the good work Sam and team and hopefully everyone affected can exercise a little bit more patients until they arrive.
Plug in a SanDisk Cruzer USB 3 thumb drive next to the 2017:1689 dongle and I think you would find the range is actually reduced by half. The previous dongle works better than what came with your Vero V, but it is affected by interference as well. As far as the placement internal vs plugged in externally, the results are a bit mixed based on what you have plugged in externally, but the internal placement usually got a bit more range vs directly plugged into the device. External does have the advantage that it can be hung off a USB extension to deal with pretty much any situation where someone might find themself facing.
From my testing they do… literally within a foot across the board in my testing. I ran distance tests using the aforementioned thumb drive, a m.2 SSD in a USB 3.1 enclosure (with three different cables and two different physical placements), a 2.5" Seagate spinning rust drive, and a 3.5" WD My Book. I ran all the scenarios with the 2017:1689 placed external and internal and then ran them again with the new prototype the exact same way. I never even wrote down any numbers for the new dongle as every test came back so close to the same distance that I had written down for the older model.
It does and the current releases of OSMC already have a patch that disables the internal receiver when an external one is plugged in so there isn’t a potential for pairing issues. Come to think of it I don’t remember if that had actually been mentioned in public yet or not. When you plug in a current model external dongle the internal USB port is disabled until the next reboot. So if someone wants to go from using the external dongle back to the internal one they will need to reboot before they will be able to re-pair their remote to that receiver.
Ah, so we’ll be able to use the new dongle with a small extension cable, and won’t need to open the device?
In that case, sign me up as well. It’s not been too bad for me (just the occasional missed keypress, and sometimes a second or two where nothing is getting registered), but I wouldn’t mind being able to experiment with the placement of the dongle to get it perfect. (My vero is stuck to the back of my tv with those 3M tabs, so I’d rather not have to remove it to find a better spot or open it up.)
I’ll happily pay for the cost of the dongle. But I do hope we can avoid having to pay the 15 euro our Belgian postal system charges for handling the VAT. (Maybe send it by bubble enveloppe with clear mention that it concerns a cost-less warranty part?)