2015-05-15, 16:46
Caveat emptor.
I ordered the Vero a couple months ago because it was advertised as being able to Bitstream TrueHD (and other HD audio codecs) to my AVR. The Raspberry Pi 2 doesn't have enough CPU grunt to do that. I have several Blu Ray direct rips (no down-encoding) that I used MakeMKV to pull off the original video & TrueHD tracks to put on my media storage array.
When I unpacked and hooked up the Vero I was pretty happy with the snappiness of the GUI and its ability to play pretty much anything from my media collection I tossed at it...... until I got to TrueHD/Atmos movies like John Wick/Atmos Demo Disc/Hunger Games Catching Fire I.
At this point the Vero pretty much fell over on itself. The video seemed mostly okay, but where the issue happened was the bitstreaming of audio back to my AVR for decoding. It would cut out every 10 seconds or so, and the audio was very choppy.
I contacted sales regarding this and they asked if I was running the latest version (I was), and basically the impression was "Well, it supports bitstreaming, I'll look into it, but we're not issuing a refund". The *only* reason I purchased the Vero was because it was advertised to support bitstreaming TrueHD when the RbP2 could not. So it is basically a 200$ paperweight to me due to the way it was marketed.
On John Wick, the CPUs peg up to 80%+ which I assume is causing the playback issues.
Here's some videos for the same .mkv file being played through the Vero & through my HTPC (which I was hoping to retire, but I guess I am not):
Vero: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBb93EUAt_M
HTPC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ylx6OhSRrP8
If you are buying this to play direct Blu Ray MKV rips with HD audio passthrough, I'd wait to see if there are any improvements in the software, but as it is now it looks like it cannot handle full blu ray / HD audio passthrough MKVs without stuttering.
I ordered the Vero a couple months ago because it was advertised as being able to Bitstream TrueHD (and other HD audio codecs) to my AVR. The Raspberry Pi 2 doesn't have enough CPU grunt to do that. I have several Blu Ray direct rips (no down-encoding) that I used MakeMKV to pull off the original video & TrueHD tracks to put on my media storage array.
When I unpacked and hooked up the Vero I was pretty happy with the snappiness of the GUI and its ability to play pretty much anything from my media collection I tossed at it...... until I got to TrueHD/Atmos movies like John Wick/Atmos Demo Disc/Hunger Games Catching Fire I.
At this point the Vero pretty much fell over on itself. The video seemed mostly okay, but where the issue happened was the bitstreaming of audio back to my AVR for decoding. It would cut out every 10 seconds or so, and the audio was very choppy.
I contacted sales regarding this and they asked if I was running the latest version (I was), and basically the impression was "Well, it supports bitstreaming, I'll look into it, but we're not issuing a refund". The *only* reason I purchased the Vero was because it was advertised to support bitstreaming TrueHD when the RbP2 could not. So it is basically a 200$ paperweight to me due to the way it was marketed.
On John Wick, the CPUs peg up to 80%+ which I assume is causing the playback issues.
Here's some videos for the same .mkv file being played through the Vero & through my HTPC (which I was hoping to retire, but I guess I am not):
Vero: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBb93EUAt_M
HTPC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ylx6OhSRrP8
If you are buying this to play direct Blu Ray MKV rips with HD audio passthrough, I'd wait to see if there are any improvements in the software, but as it is now it looks like it cannot handle full blu ray / HD audio passthrough MKVs without stuttering.
