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To most users here vero is to expensive to even consider,but I'm interested in OSMC. So I have a few questions.
1/ is OMSC like openelec? I can see Sam porting OSMC to as many platforms as possible.
2/ why will openelec and OSMC differ so much?
3/ anyone with both operating systems care to share their experience s, in terms of performance and stability. Mainly interested on the pi.
Here's an update to my earlier "review":

I have completely ditched the provided cheap and nasty remote. I always intended to use my Logitech Harmony anyway, so I learnt all the buttons from the provided remote and basically it worked as well with the Harmony as it does with the original, i.e. it is unusable. Same problems of non-response and "stuck" keys. I am certain the problem is software/driver here. I therefore switched to the USB IR receiver I was using with my Pi, and this works perfectly.

As far as GUI performance is concerned, I would say it is now on a par with RaspBMC on the Pi. I don't know if this is the result of updates (there have been several since the previous review), ditching the OSMC remote, time or some combination of the three, but I'd say it's now usable - though not the improvement on the Pi that I was expecting from the Vero hype. It does, however, take much longer (about 5-6 seconds) to start playback of any video - this is definitely much longer than it takes on the Pi.

Unfortunately I have to retract my statement that video playback is flawless. I have found several videos in my library that playback perfectly well on the Pi but experience horrific stuttering and frame skip on the Vero. I haven't yet worked out the common factor, but they are all SD videos running at 50Hz (and I have it set to match refresh rate to video frame rate just as I did on the Pi)...yet other 50Hz videos playback fine.

Also, CEC simply does not work at all. I primarily use CEC to turn off my TV when the Kodi Screensaver kicks in (I don't use it for remote control) - this function works perfectly well with RaspBMC on the Pi, but with the Vero, CEC does nothing. I see from another post that this is yet another thing that is acknowledged as not currently working on the Vero.

The crashing problem still happens (Kodi exits to a blue screen with a square sad face then Kodi restarts shortly afterwards), but I've noticed it seems to be significantly worst in the first few minutes after a reboot and tends to be when going into a menu from the home screen (doesn't seem to matter which - TV Shows, Movies, Settings). I have only had one crash that has occurred after the system has been up for a few minutes. I am using a MySQL data store (as I was with the Pi). The problem seems to be related to SYSTEM uptime rather than KODI uptime (i.e. if I exit Kodi and let the OS restart the process, the crashing doesn't occur but if I reboot the system, crashing occurs frequently for several minutes after reboot).

I'm still not impressed at the quality of what I have purchased. This is a commercial product, priced and advertised as such, and making pretty bold claims which in my view have not been delivered on. I feel I was completely misled and that in fact my money was used to bank-roll the development of the product I paid for in advance. I am pretty sure this is just the result of naivety and overambitiousness rather than a deliberate strategy, but nonetheless, it leaves a pretty bad taste in my mouth.

I would feel less cheated if, for example, pre-orders had been taken and the volume of these used as evidence to obtain a bank loan or other investment - the money should have been taken from customers at the point that an actual product was delivered. Instead, my money was taken in full (I purchased three units for myself and two friends) in November on the expectation of a product being delivered "by the January 2015 if not before" which was not actually delivered until late March and even then is not working properly. Perhaps the problem is with trying to apply an Open Source mentality (which is appropriate to OSMC) to a commercial product (Vero running OSMC). Nor can Vero be compared to a Raspberry Pi which is clearly marketed as being a low-cost "build your own" platform in the spirit of Open Source - Vero is marketed as a commercial consumer media centre solution which happens to be running Open Source software developed by the same organisation.

I am going to hold on to the Vero in the hope that eventually these issues will be sorted out, but I continue to be more than a little annoyed and disappointed at what has happened here.
Well, don't forget there was supposed to be a Kickstarter initially.
I somewhat assume Sam replaced the Kickstarter hassle (and fees) by pre-orders, but the idea stayed the same. Back in November, it was little more than a concept, and supporters pre-ordered rather than kickstarted to get it rolling.
I tried to start a conversation with Sam about my concerns as a Cubox-i2 owner. My concern was if the Vero hardware was similar to my i2 then the experience thebertster has shared might happen. The getvero.tv site is light on the specifics of the imx6 hardware, but discussion in this and other forums seem to indicate it is very similar to my i2 but with the addition of 802.11 and bluetooth.

Unfortunately it seems that while Vero with OSMC was advertised as a non-technical "just works" solution, it has not gotten there yet (if it ever does, and I do hope it does). Also, unfortunately, the device was delivered much later than promised/expected and is still not 100% of what it should be. I agree it is most likely the result of naivety as Sam appears to be quite young. I've seen way to may over-promised and under-delivered IT solutions and the other Sam that posted an initial Vero review here was right... Better to under-promise and over-deliver.

My advice would be to take people like me (that have a similar device) seriously when we raise concerns about the Vero living up to its advertising instead of assuming that we're personally attacking someone. Having had a negative experience with my i2, I was genuinely concerned that the Vero was headed down the same path. Telling me and others that we have no place commenting on a device we don't have and haven't seen wasn't productive. So far the experiences that have been shared about the Vero are very similar to those shared about the similar Cubox-i products from SolidRun.

Anyone reading through the forums at http://www.solid-run.com/community/kodi-...rd-f7.html will see many similar issues of crashes right at Kodi startup, strange slowness in menu navigation sometimes, limited range on the built-in IR receiver, high temperatures during Kodi idle times...
Yep. Seriously, pre-ordering anything based only on promises is why crowd-funding was made for, and people (should) then know the non-conformity risks.
What should ring a bell is that the Vero doesn't seem to have been sent to bloggers like CNX for review, even now that it actually ships. I cannot find any "professional" review around...
So on the Vero/OSMC forums today (https://discourse.osmc.tv) a user asked for the OSMC image for Vero because they somehow messed up their SD card. Rather than referring the user to a download URL, the image was PM'd. Does that strike anyone else as odd? Since there are image downloads for RPi and RPi2 I don't understand why there is not one now for Vero since the device is being shipped.
(2015-03-30, 17:27)zaphod24 Wrote: [ -> ]So on the Vero/OSMC forums today (https://discourse.osmc.tv) a user asked for the OSMC image for Vero because they somehow messed up their SD card. Rather than referring the user to a download URL, the image was PM'd. Does that strike anyone else as odd? Since there are image downloads for RPi and RPi2 I don't understand why there is not one now for Vero since the device is being shipped.
Has it occurred to you that Sam has just been too busy to update the installer with Vero support yet ? And that as all Vero's ship with the OS pre-installed (unlike a Raspberry Pi) that adding support to the installer is not as urgent as it appears. (To my knowledge only one Vero owner has asked for a firmware image to re-install to date)

Anyone with a bit of initiative will find that the Vero image is in fact hosted on the download servers and can be found with a little bit of poking, and that it can be imaged with win32diskimager or dd... Not to mention that the entire source tree and build system is freely and publicly available on Github - it's possible to build the Vero image yourself from scratch on a Raspberry Pi 2 or Vero by simply git cloning the repo and running the right Makefiles.

There is no dark conspiracy here, just a lack of hours in the day - the installer will be updated soon enough.
OSMC is apparently coming to Cubox-i. My guess is that the image for the Cubox-i is more or less the same.
Let's give Sam som slack Big Grin
Ok, I found a Vero image from March 22. Going to try and run it on my Cubox-i2.

Perhaps a link to the Vero images could be added to https://osmc.tv/download/images/

Edit:

As I thought might be the case, the Vero image must be specific to that hardware and doesn't boot on a Cubox-i2. Hopefully a generic imx6 that works on the i2, i4, and HummingBoard devices (like the one provided with OpenELEC) can be provided by OSMC in the near future.

As another thought, why even go through the trouble of sending the Vero image file location through PM and why not just post it right the in forum message so that others might benefit from the same answer?
Mandrake is wrong about the images for vero. They are not bootable as-is. They seem to be missing the uboot file necessary for booting and who knows what else. Its pretty clear that the Vero is a solid-run OEM device and that osmc vero is based on the SR kernel distribution. There is no reason why the vero image wouldn't run on a cubox from a hardware perspective unless the gc880 in the vero is somehow incompatible with the gc2000 found in most cuboxen. Though you'd think it would be forward compatible. Its open source right. Anyone with a vero could post their image. I'm curious about this too but not so curious that I can be bothered to build the thing from the sources especially since its in flux right now.
Not sure what the process is, but at least for the RPi/RPi2 it looks like there is some software to install (osmc-installer) on a Linux desktop that can then image the SD card. I don't know if that uses/downloads the images mentioned before or what (I don't like installing items on my desktop that are only used to install something on an SD card). Perhaps it is similar for the Vero? I personally find the process with something like OpenELEC much easier where there is SD card creation script included in the download itself that creates the correct SD card filesystems.

I'm sure I'll be told that I am once again commenting on hardware(Vero) and software(OSMC) that I haven't seen/used yet, but... It would be extremely helpful to detail the *exact* hardware in the Vero just like what SolidRun has done for the Cubox-i platform at http://www.solid-run.com/products/cubox-...ifications

Based on the Vero OSMC image I was able to download, the device tree file looks like the Vero is an i.MX6 Dual Lite which is also what is in my Cubox-i2. The Vero does come with 802.11 and bluetooth. Looking on the SolidRun store, an i2 with the 802.11 and bluetooth options is $99 and includes a power adapter and an 8gig microSD card. The only other hardware the Vero has which the Cubox-i2 does not is the nifty little remote. Guessing that is worth $20, that leaves ~$80 for the 3 years of OSMC support. A little more than $25/year isn't bad. The cost to OSMC may even be lower by buying so many devices in bulk.

If the hardware is, as I've guessed, and i.MX6 Dual Lite then I would expect it to perform similar to my i2. It works great for most local (NFS/SMB) shared content, especially if the content is progressive with a constant frame rate. For over-the-air digial HD and/or Cable and Satellite that is interlaced and complex with periodic frame rate changes (most often during advertisements) it might not do too well.

I just recently provided a sample from a program recorded off of my HD Homerun Prime that was giving OMXPlayer on the RPi2 fits. The developers are looking at it and already commented that different advertisements switched audio from 5.1 to 2 channel and vice-versa as well as some strange progressive vs interlaced changes. Hopefully Kodi will be improved by analyzing such a stream.

If the goal of the Vero is to be a great local file media player, it's probably already mostly there. If the goal is for it to play almost anything thrown at it (within reason, it doesn't have H265 hardware decoding for instance) then it is my opinion it will ultimately fall short.

Just my (unwanted) 2c.
(2015-03-30, 23:13)Dufus Wrote: [ -> ]Mandrake is wrong about the images for vero. They are not bootable as-is. They seem to be missing the uboot file necessary for booting and who knows what else. Its pretty clear that the Vero is a solid-run OEM device and that osmc vero is based on the SR kernel distribution. There is no reason why the vero image wouldn't run on a cubox from a hardware perspective unless the gc880 in the vero is somehow incompatible with the gc2000 found in most cuboxen. Though you'd think it would be forward compatible. Its open source right. Anyone with a vero could post their image. I'm curious about this too but not so curious that I can be bothered to build the thing from the sources especially since its in flux right now.
No offence Dufus, but you simply don't know what you're talking about.

The images ARE complete and bootable on a Vero and are the exact images sent on shipped Veros. I know this for a fact because it's the same image I've installed on my preproduction unit with win32diskimager...I never said they would boot on a Cubox-i as-is however, which seems to be your assumption.

The gc880 and gc2000 are not compatible at a driver level, if the OS doesn't have explicit gc2000 support built in it won't boot a gc2000 device. There are other hardware differences as well, as the Vero does not have the same combination of hardware specs as any of the cubox-i models.
(2015-03-31, 03:06)zaphod24 Wrote: [ -> ]Not sure what the process is, but at least for the RPi/RPi2 it looks like there is some software to install (osmc-installer) on a Linux desktop that can then image the SD card. I don't know if that uses/downloads the images mentioned before or what (I don't like installing items on my desktop that are only used to install something on an SD card). Perhaps it is similar for the Vero? I personally find the process with something like OpenELEC much easier where there is SD card creation script included in the download itself that creates the correct SD card filesystems.
The installer does not require installing (it's a standalone executable even on Windows) and is entirely optional. There is already a download link to the Raspberry Pi images which are simply gzipped disk images. You can download one of these images, gunzip it and write it directly to SD with dd or a tool like win32diskimager. (This is identical to what you do with the img version of OpenElec BTW) The Vero images work exactly the same way as the RPi images.

The installer fetches the exact same images from the server that you can manually download, (although there are additional images on the server that were interim builds that the installer doesn't expose) and also has an option to select an already downloaded image from your hard drive. Aside from ease of use for Newbies the installer provides one additional feature - you can preconfigure network settings (Wifi and/or Static IP's) or set up a USB or NFS install. If you don't need these, you don't need the installer.
Ok. Well I used dd to write the Vero image I downloaded to a microSD card and tried to boot my Cubox-i2 with it. It didn't boot or bring up any video so I guess the Vero image isn't compatible with the Cubox-i2 hardware.

Can anyone detail the actual hardware in the Vero and specifically how it differs from the i2? The i2 is an i.MX6 Dual Lite with a GC880 gpu and the memory is 64 bit, 1GByte @ 800Mbps.
I've been following this thread, although I can't pin point the information you after it had been discussed and all the details your asking including the difference and similarities between vero and cubox is in this thread, namely at the beginning.
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