Vero 4K OSMC box................
Could this be the ultimate media player for your living room? Nick Peers thinks so, but not simply because of its ability to play 4K video.
A Pi-beating mini-media box, running everyone’s favourite open source media centre.
The Vero 4K is as future-proofed as you can possibly imagine. Its specifications could read as a fanboy’s wish list – unsurprising given it’s been put together by the good folk at OSMC, the open-source media centre.
All this goodness is housed inside an unremarkable black square box with LED light on the front and ports on the rear and left-hand side. Also included is a stick-on mount for the back of your TV, USB RF receiver and remote control, HDMI cable, PSU and IR extender should you prefer an all-inone remote.
Setup is as easy as you’d expect. Connect the Vero 4K to your big-screen telly, switch it on and run through the straightforward OSMC setup wizard. You’d normally do this with your remote, although temporarily connecting a USB keyboard will speed things up.
Any hiccups from here on in can be levelled at OSMC and the underlying media player, Kodi. We’ve always found it can be confusing and long-winded to navigate in parts. Thankfully, the Vero 4K responds swiftly and smoothly to the clicks of your remote as you go hunting for buried settings.
When it comes to fulfilling its main brief – media playback – the Vero 4K handles SD, HD and 4K with aplomb, although your network connection will be crucial for streaming. The fast Wi-Fi interface (802.11ac) may be sufficient if you’re close enough to the router, but otherwise the non-Gigabit Ethernet port can handle the throughput of anything you throw at it, even 4K streaming. Perhaps more disappointing is the lack of a USB 3.0 port, but again USB 2.0 is sufficient for playing 4K video.
Dedicated 4K hardware
Playback itself is smooth and stutterfree – as expected given the hardware was built specifically for 4K support. The quad-core A53 chip runs at 1.6GHz and is backed up by a five-core Mail450MP GPU. This enables it to handle 10-bit H.265 and VP9 codecs, the cornerstone of 4K video right now. There’s no scrimping on the audio side either, with HD Audio passthrough and up to 7.1 channels supported, along with DTS:X and Dolby Atmos. SPDIF and analogue out sockets complement the HDMI 2.0 port to give you maximum flexibility connecting to speakers.
We know what you’re thinking: “But I don’t currently have 4K and can stream HD happily with a Raspberry Pi 3 for half the cost”. And you’d be right if your set-top needs don’t extend to 4K video or HD audio.
Yet the Vero 4K is capable of much more, and its manufacturers know it. You’re almost doing it a disservice by using the Vero 4K simply to play media, however demanding your playback needs. For starters, the OSMC operating system is built on top of Debian Stretch, and provides full access to apt-get , so you can bolt on extra functionality as required – with 16GB of onboard storage to play with and 2GB RAM you have plenty of wriggle-room.
SSH is enabled by default, so just remotely log in from your main PC whenever you want to have a play. You have access to the official Stretch repositories of course, and you can download other packages, too. Note that although the Vero 4K is 64-bit, it runs a 64-bit kernel with 32-bit userland. That means armhf packages are required by default, although a quick sudo apt-get install gcc:arm64 extends support to arm64 packages, too.
The most logical extension of your Vero 4K is as a media server. To this end, Emby is simple to install, run and configure via the official download. Plex aficionados will need the Stretchcompatible version for Pi users (Google ‘Pi Plex Stretch’), but once you’ve jumped through those hoops it’s as simple to configure through your web
browser as Emby. In both cases, the Vero proved more than capable of handling media server duties. It was even capable of transcoding live TV recordings into H264 on the fly in Plex. While it’s not going to rival your desktop PC anytime soon, the Vero 4K’s superiority over the Pi 3 is clearly evident here.
Long-term support?
It’s this underlying flexibility that makes the Vero 4K a worthy purchase. You’re not buying something that will be discarded in six to 12 months due to a lack of support or hardware inadequacies. Software updates are promised for the next five years, and lots of new features are in the pipeline, many of which will ship on the Vero first. Two mooted features are a basic desktop for the underlying OS as well as a web browser for the OSMC frontend.
The SD-card and USB slots also come into play, enabling you to – in theory for now – dual-boot OSMC with another OS. The most developed plans are to release an Android emulator, effectively making it possible to use the Vero 4K to run apps and play games designed for Android. But you can compile your own distros from source too: the big issue is making sure you’re using a Vero 4K kernel, which involves a bit of legwork and expertise on your part in recompiling sources. The brilliant OSMC support forums (https://discourse.osmc.tv) ride to your rescue here, with OSMC founder Sam Nazarko a visible presence, bending over backwards to answer questions and help where he can.
Niggles? Naturally there are a few, but when the biggest one you can find is the fact the unit’s LED can’t be switched off (it’s piercing blue or red light isn’t suitable for the bedroom) you know you’re almost nitpicking for the sake of it. The answer to this problem, of course, is to stick some black electrical tape over the LED.
Other issues can often be solved with the help of OSMC’s forums. For example, one user discovered the Vero 4K couldn’t restrict its audio output to SPDIF only – contrary to the behaviour on the older Vero 1 model. Although this was in part down to the 4K’s SoC, OSMC investigated and found a way to disable the output via a system tweak.
It’s this level of care and attention that makes the Vero 4K such great value. You’re not simply paying for the hardware, however impressive and flexible it is, and you’re not simply paying to support the OSMC project; you’re getting stellar levels of customer support too. In an age where cutting corners to keep the costs down has driven support into the wilderness, it’s a refreshing change to see you get exactly what you pay for – in a good way. Long story short, buy the Vero 4K now to future-proof your media home, and while you wait to save up for a 4K TV, make good use of its top-notch spec and flexibility to get your money’s worth (and then some).
“The most logical extension of your Vero 4K is as a media server”