(2015-03-22, 14:50)Milhouse Wrote: [ -> ] (2015-03-22, 14:20)samburrows Wrote: [ -> ]Personally, if it hadn't have been for the ability to be finally able to access DTS / 5.1 sound content then I would be really disappointed with the device as it would have offered nothing over my previous Pi setup (in fact, being critical, it would have offered less).
@samburrows: I have to ask the obvious question, why couldn't you get DTS/5.1 surround content working with the Pi (over HDMI)?
Well that'a s tale of woe which probably isn't that helpful for this thread! My AV receiver hated my Raspberry Pi - it skewed the image off the screen, CEC didn't work and various other problems. It's a very good Onkyo receiver so was loathe to change a £500 piece of hardware to accommodate the needs of a £30 circuit board! Because of these issues, I resorted to a workaround - Pi plugged in to TV directly via HDMI and then TV to AV receiver via digital optical cable. It delivered a nice sound and ProLogic did a decent job of creating a surround ambience but impossible to get discrete 5.1 through that setup. I was always happy to live with the limitation until I found a new piece of hardware and Vero was earmarked to be the solution to that particular problem.
OK fair enough. When testing the Pi with my Onkyo AV I've never had a problem (originally a TX-NR905, currently a TX-NR828). Maybe a slight incompatibility with your particular AV reciever, or even a component slightly out of spec. Strange you didn't bring it to the attention of anyone on this forum, but glad you've found your solution.
(2015-03-22, 14:20)samburrows Wrote: [ -> ]Hi, I received mine yesterday. Here is my initial review, which I have just uploaded to the OSMC forums too. Hope it is useful.
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I received my Vero in the post yesterday and after a morning of setting it up and optimising it to my tastes I thought I would share my initial thoughts. By way of background, I am a longtime RaspBMC user, although for the past 6 months have been using openELEC on Raspberry Pi Model B as I found it much faster.
What's in the box?
Everything was very well packaged and protected. In the box was the Vero itself - even smaller than I was expecting - a remote control, a solid power adaptor and an HDMI lead. There was also a very nice looking colour card which pointed me towards the OSMC quick start page. All good so far, although my only piece of feedback here would be to suggest that for true HTPC novices (target market?) the card should really contain the top 5 'must know' pieces of information rather than just a weblink. Minor stuff though.
Plugging in
This was all easy enough. One of the things which attracted me to Vero was the fact it would be able to handle DTS, 5.1, multichannel sound etc. The quickstart page recommended I used the Optical out if I wished to activate these features and pointed me to the correct settings page to toggle the audio output accordingly. I found that the optical was unable to correctly process and sen 5.1 FLAC files to my AV receive - some reading online showed me this is a common issue with the optical output so I removed this and sent everything through HDMI. Once this was activated and I had toggled the right settings I was delighted to find I was receiving discrete 5.1 channel surround sound from my Vero. Sam - I would suggest amending this on the QuickStart page; the vast majority of people with AV receivers will be using HDMI which negates the need to use the optical out to the receiver.
Software
This was the first time I have used OSMC. I've given it a few hours of solid use and unfortunately it just isn't to my tastes. I recognise that this is highly subjective so please don't take it as a criticism. I have reverted back to the Amber skin which I have been using for years and it now looks exactly how I would like it to.
As per Sam's advice, I manually checked for updates when I first booted the Vero. As expected, it downloaded a ton of updates and prompted me to restart the machine. I restarted and it dropped into the classic blue screen updating view with a progress bar. Unfortunately, after about 20 minutes the bar had been fixed at 44% for a long time and I deduced that the system had hung. Again, this would be quite disconcerting for a novice. I power cycled the device and thankfully it had not lost any data, just booted back into Kodi. This morning I attempted the update procedure again and this time it seemed to work smoothly and quickly.
AudioVisual quality
Nothing to fault here. The components must be of a good quality as both picture and sound are excellent. As previously mentioned, the 5.1 surround is superb and something I've been really missing from my previous Pi setup.
Performance
I must say I'm a bit disappointed with the overall speed performance of the device. For processor intensive tasks such as a couple of streaming addons I've been using for years the speed performance is a definite improvement and for that I'm thankful. Overall however, the interface is certainly a lot slower than my Raspberry Pi openELEC setup which positively glided through the menu system. I don't really understand why this is, the technical specs of the Vero are a beast in comparison, it should be making mincemeat of these menus. Boot / reboot times are very fast, as you would expect. I'm not saying the device is slow, it's perfectly usable, but it is noticeably slower than my previous setup - it is struggling with the music visualisations for example, something I haven't experienced since the earlier days of RaspBMC.
Remote Control
HDMI-CEC just will not work for me. This was always one of the huge pluses of the Pi setup, particularly as my wife found using the TV control so intuitive. I'm not sure if this is a fault or not, my Pi CEC would not work when plugged into the AV receiver HDMI either. I expect it is a hardware issue my end with the Onkyo AV receiver but I'm out of ideas on how to solve it.
Thankfully, the Vero comes with a custom remote control which mitigates the issue for me. The jury is out on the remote still in my house - it looks great, and is pretty miniature which is good for keeping the room clutter free. The buttons are quite clicky, which I don't really like, but again that's subjective. I'm probably only getting an 80% success rate with button presses which is frustrating and feels like you're fighting against the Vero. I'm not sure why this is, I suspect it's software lag of some kind so hopefully this will improve.
Conclusion
Overall, I applaud Sam for a fantastic project which he's seen through to fruition. Yes it was delivered late (note of advice, particularly for IT projects - always try and underpromise / overdeliver) but the fruits of labour are obvious. At the moment, it isn't without gripes and I would expect to see some big performance improvements over the next few months. The speed performance of the device is really disappointing compared to openELEC on the Pi and I will probably do some reading to see how easy installing openELEC would be on this device. Right now, I don't think it's worth £134.99 but this opinion could move if more improvements are delivered. I also don't think a novice could dive in and start using one of these devices but that may also change over time. Personally, if it hadn't have been for the ability to be finally able to access DTS / 5.1 sound content then I would be really disappointed with the device as it would have offered nothing over my previous Pi setup (in fact, being critical, it would have offered less).
Overall, a solid start but a long way to go.
Thank you so much for this thorough review!
As the owner of a Cubox-i2, your initial experience was (unfortunately) exactly what I was expecting. I was hoping that OSMC had been tuned a bit more to the i.MX6 hardware since it's been 3 months from initial order to delivery. Instead, it sounds like you're experiencing some of the same things I did with the i2 that eventually convinced me to move to an RPi2 (where I put 2 RPi2 systems together for about the same price as 1 Vero).
I don't need the 5.1 audio (yet anyway), so for me that isn't a difference-maker. I see on the OSMC forums that work is already under way to try and improve the IR response. That was one of the more annoying issues I experienced with my i2 as well. I'd also be interested to know what kind of range you're seeing with the IR remote. I was just using a standard MCE remote and it wasn't good/reliable more than 3 or 4 meters away from the receiver. The same remote works well across the room with the USB receiver on my RPi2.
Have a look at the deinterlacing thread at
http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=211289. I would be curious how this sample from there does on your Vero,
http://solidrun.maltegrosse.de/~fritsch/1080i50_h264.ts. My i2 just could not keep up when deinterlacing was enabled and by the end of playback the video/audio sync was several seconds out of wack. From the developers posting in that thread with access to several different devices, the i4 does seem to do much better.
$199 is a very steep price for what it sounds like you've been delivered so far. The 3 years of support makes it better, but I've seen too many similar claims end up not being fulfilled when companies go under.
Quote:As the owner of a Cubox-i2, your initial experience was (unfortunately) exactly what I was expecting. I was hoping that OSMC had been tuned a bit more to the i.MX6 hardware since it's been 3 months from initial order to delivery. Instead, it sounds like you're experiencing some of the same things I did with the i2 that eventually convinced me to move to an RPi2 (where I put 2 RPi2 systems together for about the same price as 1 Vero).
I don't need the 5.1 audio (yet anyway), so for me that isn't a difference-maker. I see on the OSMC forums that work is already under way to try and improve the IR response. That was one of the more annoying issues I experienced with my i2 as well. I'd also be interested to know what kind of range you're seeing with the IR remote. I was just using a standard MCE remote and it wasn't good/reliable more than 3 or 4 meters away from the receiver. The same remote works well across the room with the USB receiver on my RPi2.
Have a look at the deinterlacing thread at http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=211289. I would be curious how this sample from there does on your Vero, http://solidrun.maltegrosse.de/~fritsch/1080i50_h264.ts. My i2 just could not keep up when deinterlacing was enabled and by the end of playback the video/audio sync was several seconds out of wack. From the developers posting in that thread with access to several different devices, the i4 does seem to do much better.
$199 is a very steep price for what it sounds like you've been delivered so far. The 3 years of support makes it better, but I've seen too many similar claims end up not being fulfilled when companies go under.
Just to weigh in here. $199 allows us to reliably deliver support and updates for years to come. Yes, I could have got this on to the market at a lower price, but a good part of the pricepoint covers support and development. There's no point shipping hardware if you can't support it with good software.
We won't be going under.
(2015-03-22, 14:20)samburrows Wrote: [ -> ]The speed performance of the device is really disappointing compared to openELEC on the Pi and I will probably do some reading to see how easy installing openELEC would be on this device.
Not sure how 3 years of support is going to help if folks just jump ship to another distro that runs Kodi in search of better/faster performance. I used Geexbox and OpenELEC on my Cubox-i2 and both worked pretty good. I'd love to evaluate OSMC on my Cubox-i2 as well.
Skylake is around the corner....
(2015-03-23, 19:51)zaphod24 Wrote: [ -> ] (2015-03-22, 14:20)samburrows Wrote: [ -> ]The speed performance of the device is really disappointing compared to openELEC on the Pi and I will probably do some reading to see how easy installing openELEC would be on this device. As you can see here however,
Not sure how 3 years of support is going to help if folks just jump ship to another distro that runs Kodi in search of better/faster performance. I used Geexbox and OpenELEC on my Cubox-i2 and both worked pretty good. I'd love to evaluate OSMC on my Cubox-i2 as well.
(2015-03-23, 20:27)MediaPi Wrote: [ -> ]Skylake is around the corner....
Clearly OpenELEC and GeexBox have not provided you with enough, or you would not be posting here. We don't lock down our bootloader: so users can do whatever they want with a Vero.
Can we actually have people who purchased Vero comment here? Instead of a paranoid developer who sees his user-base slipping by the day and disgruntled CuBox users?
I think this thread should be locked and a new one made, where people that have actually bought a Vero can comment in it.
This will be my last post in this thread. We work on improving the Vero experience, and the Vero experience only. Please start a new thread for i.MX6 issues.
(2015-03-23, 22:15)Sam.Nazarko Wrote: [ -> ]Can we actually have people who purchased Vero comment here? Instead of a paranoid developer who sees his user-base slipping by the day and disgruntled CuBox users?
Hahaha you are talking about yourself right? Can't imagine any one else.
..
Care to explain?
We have always encouraged users to try all available distributions for their platform.. I am not exactly sure what part of the sentence you are quoting.
We are all waiting for reviews of the actual device.
I don't think any of the devs has used Vivante's little brother GPU (gc800) for more than quick runs, so we are eager to hear how it performs.
(2015-03-24, 08:20)Koying Wrote: [ -> ]We are all waiting for reviews of the actual device.
I don't think any of the devs has used Vivante's little brother GPU (gc800) for more than quick runs, so we are eager to hear how it performs.
I've seen two reviews 'in the wild now' - my own on the previous page of this forum and then this 'first impressions' piece from 4nd:
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4nd Review
Quote: I'd also be interested to know what kind of range you're seeing with the IR remote. I was just using a standard MCE remote and it wasn't good/reliable more than 3 or 4 meters away from the receiver. The same remote works well across the room with the USB receiver on my RPi2.
Just to follow up on this. I re-positioned the device last night so that the range between sofa and Vero was much reduced - now only about 2.5 meters, plus panel angled more towards the viewing angle. The remote now seems to work flawlessly and has removed a fair amount of frustration - you may be right about the limited range.
@
samburrows What seemed strange on your review is that you pointed out that the GUI was slower than your RPI1B.
The second review do not seem to mention it, and it's hard to tell from his video (we don't know at what pace he pressed the remote buttons).
(2015-03-24, 12:19)Koying Wrote: [ -> ]@samburrows What seemed strange on your review is that you pointed out that the GUI was slower than your RPI1B.
The second review do not seem to mention it, and it's hard to tell from his video (we don't know at what pace he pressed the remote buttons).
I don't have any formal benchmarks but there is absolutely no doubt about it for my system. I'm running the same Amber skin, with the some add-ons enabled, the same network setup, same library etc.
OpenElec on my RPi1B glided through the menus and other elements of the GUI.
OSMC is a little bit laggy when scrolling etc.
The programmes and webstreams do seem to load more quickly than on the Pi though.