So i’ve been wondering I’m running an old 512 B pi atm but it’ll be time for an upgrade soon but I can’t seem to find any in depth specs on the Vero nor the new Pi really.
Ofcourse you can find the basic stuff like CPU speed and amount of RAM but I can’t seem to find bus speeds, I/O speed of the internal Vero memory, Power usage, etc. etc. and nobody seems to have made a comparison chart between the 2 yet…
Ofcourse I’m posting this on OSMC so some people will be biased (Sam :P) and automatically point towards the Vero but I just want some honest opinions and a good way to compare the two. I’d rather support OSMC at this point them PI because they already have enough of my money but still, I’m going for whatever is fastest for what I need it for lol.
So what I generally run on it and want to run quickly are the OS (duh), python related stuff like Couchpotato and Sickbeard/Sickrage/Sickgear, Transmission (would love a better client though like rtorrent or something because transmission is just sh*t lol) and obviously all the webservices needed for remote viewing.
On a normal Pi everything works, it’s slow, the USB bus IO isn’t fast enough to upload and download at the same time, well, to be honest, it barely uploads at all. The load times for webservers take forever and I don’t even bother trying to stream something to someone else because that isn’t going to happen with that setup. So all in all it works, but I can’t say it’s a beast.
So I obviously want to upgrade to something that CAN run a properly automated media center and, if possible, something that can play H265 as well.
Go for Vero ;-), but you can probably only install OSMC on Vero, you do have more of a choice with rpi2… like openelec and use of GPIO… but performance wise… Vero ;-).
OSMC will also work on Pi 1 (preferable 512 MB version), Pi 2, probably Hummingboard and of course Vero.
It might extend to more platforms with time, but that is atleast the ones it should support at release.
Vero will no doubt be faster than the Pi 2. The reasons are:
ARM A7 vs A9. A9 (Vero/i.MX6) is at same clock speed 25-50% faster than A7 (Pi 2)
1GB DDR3 memory (Vero) vs 1GB LPDDR2 (Pi 2)
64bit memory bus (Vero) vs. Probably 32bit (Pi 2)
1Gbit LAN (Vero) vs. 100Mbit (Pi 2)
All in all the Vero would with all the extra bandwidth and speed probably be about twice as fast as the Pi 2, even though Pi 2 is Quad-core and Vero is only Dual-core. The extra speed in the A9 vs A7 makes very well up for that.
Vero consumes less power than Raspberry Pi Model B+ and Model 2 in our testing. This was with integrated WiFi enabled playing 1080p. Even so, we are talking very small differences when you actually pay the electric bill.
I am not locking down the bootloader. If you want to install another OS like Arch Linux, Ubuntu, Debian you can, but I obviously can’t provide software support for this. There will be a disk image to bring you back on Vero OS though, so feel free to experiment.
The problem is that in an ideal world, Vero and the Quad-core Raspberry Pi would be neck and neck. But the Vero comes out faster because clock-for-clock Vero has faster cores. Many Python add-ons are not really multithreaded, or at least not enough to take advantage of four threads. Therefore the single core performance is very much a determining factor in speed. This is something Vero takes the lead in.
Sounds like you could benefit from Python performance here. If you are attaching a hard drive the USB bus gives you a bit more leeway as well.
Have you tried Deluge? It has a web UI and that’s what I’d like to ship.
Something we can’t do with Vero either.
When people are deciding I like to say that if you can get away with a Pi go for it, but if you want something a bit more powerful and flexible, the Vero is a better bet. The Pi 2 is amazing in terms of what you get for the price.
If you have any more questions, let me know here, as I’m sure others will want to read this as well
I think I would actually benefit more from the Vero then from the Rpi 2.
The fact that the Vero uses about as much power as the Rpi 2 is pretty much what I expected but it wasn’t specified anywhere so I figured I’d ask. Most people buying Rpi’s as media centers or cheaper slower replacements for network (and remote network) servers the difference between the power consumption of a simple NUC (50ish watt I think) vs a Pi (8 watt or lower) is enormous and a lot of people just take the fact that it’s slower for granted.
For me the Vero would obviously make my programs run more then fast enough, I know Sickrage has Multithreading programmed in (because ech3lon worked on that for normal PC users) but I doubt it will be significantly faster on a quad then on this sort of dual processor.
The memory used and the 64 bit bus is a major increase as well for overal preformance so I think the Vero might be able to get pushed a bit more over time.
@ Sam, what is the I/O of the internal storage? and how do the busses handle the load? Could it handle running the apps I mentioned, downloading at 5MB/s and uploading at 1MB/s at the same time while using a USB 3.0 HDD as the storage source of the data being transfered (so a better question would be, could the USB busses handle it or are they connected with the Ethernet card etc. etc.)
One other thing, I mentioned H265 because one of the devs of RPi mentioned they would look into software encoding for both the H265 codecs and 3D and that it would most likely work. I don’t know how much truth is behind that ofcourse but maybe it’s worth benchmarking it and having a test?
And last but not least, congrats on the creation of the Vero btw Sam, it looks great and the specs seem awesome. The price is a bit steeper but that was expected since RPi has much more money for dev and and construction since it’s just been around longer and is already one of the “known titans” in this field :).
Well done!
What do you want to know about the vero2? The specs are fully listed on the website. I covered some differences when the Pi 3 launched in the blog post.
I had to dig back through blog posts and comments but I found what I was looking for.
I’m really interested in the Vero 2, but the lack of optical out was a deal breaker for me. That is the only reason I went with a PI3 with a Hifiberry Digi+. It cost more than the Vero would have, but I have a couple of Home theatre-In-a-Box systems in my house that only have optical in. In fact I don’t think a single one of my AVR’s has SPDIF (They all have between 1-3 Optical Toslink though). For these 2 systems in particular, I need optical out to get 5.1
My main home theater room I just take Audio off HDMI with my proper 7.1 rig, so that’s a no brainer, but all of my smaller systems that tie into my Kodi network are usually using smaller sound systems. In my Bedroom and Living room for instance, they use smaller home-theatre-in-a-box type systems or sound bars. My garage has a PI and powered speakers over analog, and my nerd room (its full of Lego and about 2500 Blu Rays/DVD’s) also has a similar Pi + Analog setup.
The Vero however looks very promising when the Android build is available. I would seriously consider buying a Vero 2 for a couple of the areas that need upgrading (and can make do with analog)
