Beta version v6.4.65 for Z9X/Z10 Pro/Z1000 Pro/UHD3000, v6.7.85 for NEO S/NEO X/NEO Alpha release

NFO refresh, NFO changes triggering a rescan, local images retained in backups, relative paths saved in NFOs rather than absolute paths - that sort of thing.

I was promised a lot of this stuff a year ago, November 22 to be exact, but then Eversolo came along and stuck a knife in the media players development and since then the new boxes have arrived and to be honest have been a bit of a shambles.

I've got a nice glass of red on the go here so let me tell you a story about BD menus...

Zidoo have always written their own BDJava libraries - they're too big of a company with too much integrity to, how to put this... steal the BDJava libraries from the BDA (BluRay Disc Association). And it's too costly to join the BDA to have access to their IPR. Zidoo are big, but not Sony big.

Years ago the Zidoo BluRay libraries worked really really well for 2K BluRay. So well in fact that a certain French company also beginning with Z stole them from Zidoo. In fact if you decompile the firmware from their boxes - let's call one a "4K Mini HDR" for the sake of argument, you can actually see not only the stolen code but also actual references to Zidoo in there! Les Bonkers.

Then there's a certain Russian company that rhymes with tune. They decided wtf, let's just nick the BDA's IPR and have done with it. What they gonna do? So their BD Menus are very good.

But for bad reasons.

Then the Z company that's not Zidoo decided to use the same company to build their boxes and write their firmware that the tune company uses and suddenly the Z company are using the BDA's IPR as well. Apparently they didn't know this at the time. Apparently neither did the Russian company. Oh, who to believe!!!

Then the Z company that's not Zidoo went bust but they managed to get their mates together and renamed themselves in a bold phoenix move to R_Badge (or something similar) and as far as I know use the same company to build their boxes and write their firmware as before.

But I have to admit this bit is just conjecture and assumption on my part - I don't know this for a fact, but given their size, I can't think of any other way it can work. So guess what....? But as I say, this is conjecture so possibly unfair and possibly completely untrue.

This leaves Zidoo, who still write their own BD code from scratch using free libraries (I forget the name) and you know what, it's really difficult - BDJava is bloody hard - the BDA would rather you pay them to use their code, so they use all sorts of sneaky obfuscation techniques to make it harder and harder to use BDJava. So Zidoo are constantly playing catchup and if I'm honest I doubt they'll ever get there. There's too much else going on.

But it's not something I've pushed for - BD Menus in my humble opinion are time vampires of the worst order and I honestly don't see the point. But I know I may be in a minority

Anyway, there you go. A little weekend yarn for everyone!

 

I’m going to wait awhile as .62_G works well for me. There doesn’t appear to be anything in .65_G for me.
On subtitles the change is a disaster. If necessary I tend to download subs directly from a number of internet sources, sometimes I convert srt files to .ass. They look better on the Zidoo and you can add a few effects. Removing the details from the Zidoo download, like TXT or SDH is a big mistake. I can understand removing the full names of various rips from illegal torrents sources in some case, possibly protects Zidoo from legal complication's. Technically it is illegal to download subtitles in many jurisdictions. But an ident regarding SDH or plain TXT and maybe frame rate it was derived from woukd be useful.

 

Why is there no Hebrew support?
When choosing menus in Hebrew
The audio menu
and the subtitles menu are empty
At least they corrected the punctuation marks in the subtitles

 

Subtitles mostly come from https://www.opensubtitles.org so the Zidoo sub downloads depends on availability from external sites. You could try also https://www.podnapisi.net/

 

hi netmask thankes
other>language>hebrew
This is already the 20th time I write that there is a bug
When the zidoo menus are set in the English language
which is the situation that I work everything is fine
When I define the menus in the Hebrew language
The subtitle menu and the audio menu are empty

I know sites where you can download subtitles in Hebrew
The problem is that although there are subtitles in different languages
And there is a choice of audio, the field is empty when the menu is set in the Hebrew language

 

Mark,

I'm also hanging out on .42 firmware. My only real complaints are:

1. HDMI syncs seem to fail from time to time, causing a resync loop that can take up to 10-15 seconds to lock in. I don't have this issue with the two other sources in my system (Panasonic UHD player and Apple TV 4k).

2. I use Digital Signage Mode to demo specific movie scenes. When you leverage DSM it seems to disable the "Continue Movie Prompt" that you get while using HT4.0. You have to re-enable manually after finishing with Signage mode.

These would currently be the only two fixes that would lead me to upgrade firmware, everything else is solid.

 

Well, at least they issued a new firmware for the Z9X line…
The only interesting point for me was "4.Fixed the issue of occasionally not being able to retrieve the actor list." so I installed this firmware.
Not fixed actually. I just looked at two examples, the full first season of The Twilight Zone (1959) and the movie Jules et Jim (1962), they still only display the synopsis, no director, no actors. Old, very old issue. I refreshed the metadata, I rematched the movie, still empty.

 

Try TMM to match and download actors, works for me on very old titles.

 

If you were to edit the NFO file with an extra actors name for example, would that change trigger Zidoo to refresh the NFO? I’ll try it and see.

 

Wow...I didn't know Zappiti stole the BDJ codes from Zidoo. Well...one can technically infer that it is "not" stealing since the source codes compiled on BDJ are not "original" to begin with. But applaud Zidoo's effort to make the BD menu work in the first place. I guess we shouldn't expect much from Zidoo on this BD Menu fix.

 

I had the 500GB from Launch - I sold it and then got tempted with the 2017 version, sold that - bought 2x 2019 Pro's but after lot's and lot's of pain and heartache they are now also long gone, I am really susceptible to Judder and skipped frames, Zidoo (with your help I think) managed to nail this, so thank you.
People complain about the Zidoo's constantly be in in Beta - but a lot of things on the Shield should never have got out of Alpha, the biggest pain was when they broke file permissions on PMS, the fixes in my situation never truly fixed remote access, I spent a lot of money replacing the shield with a Headless Ubuntu server but I've never looked back.
Yes the Zidoo's can be frustrating, but in the scheme of things they (eventually) become pretty reliable.

 

Since opensubtitles.org changed to opensubtitles.com i think this is the change they made in the new FW?
the .org does not ping here anymore..

 

TMM ? I can only match with TMDB for movies (and TVDB and TVMaze for series). I found on a search engine a scraper called Tiny Media Manager (maybe that's TMM) but it doesn't seem to be part of HT.
It seems to be quite random, many movies from the early 1900s are fully populated, even niche shorts. The data is definitely on TMDB and TVDB, there's a problem in fetching (or displaying) it.

 

Unfortunately not - I asked for that feature a year ago and it was confirmed to be added in April this year. Unfortunately that never happened.

 

The libraries Zidoo use are open source (I think it's libbluray but I'm not 100% sure), but the BDJava code was written by and belongs to Zidoo so it absolutely was stealing.

Just to clarify, it was the original development team at the French company who did this and when new management took over they told me they had no idea the previous owners had done this and to be fair to them I do believe that.

 

My feelings exactly. And I'm the same with judder - one skipped frame and I'm out of it!

Yeah it was back in the 1295 days when Dune, Zappiti and Zidoo boxes all had frame repeats on 23.976 content (the actual framerate was between 23.978 and 23.988 so there was a frame repeat between 1 - 8 minutes or so) and I convinced Zidoo to buy an HDFury Vertex to check it - and they were then the only company to fix frame rates on the 1295 boxes.

I made a real nuisance of myself to get that fixed - I never bothered with Zappiti because I didn't like the interface, Dune wouldn't listen, but Zidoo did, and it kind of cemented my relationship with Zidoo from then on.

I still have a Shield though - just in case I feel like watching a bunch of advertising

 

Thank you for this. Very well written to the point where I actually read the whole thing It certainly helps to put everything in context.

But as you yourself say, you may be in the minority. If that is the case, then shouldn't you be pushing for BD Menus to be improved?

 

Hello everyone,

The ''BDmenu'' feature will be discussed ad vitam aeternam on this forum.

it seems that this FW does not bring anything major, should we ignore this fw .65 and wait for a hypothetical other FW?

For my part, I use my Zidoo almost every day and it works well with my usage.

The remote control supplied with my Zidoo X20pro, which I've been using for many years with all my Zidoo models, is starting to have problems (the back button works intermittently).

See you soon

 

Hey Olivier! Great to see you here again!

 

I have tried in the past, I just think it's pointless.

Any development on BD Menu would have to happen on the new boxes and then trickle down to the older ones, but there are so many fundamental issues with the new boxes to be fixed that they have to take precedence.

And I just don't think the devs have either the inclination or the time to spend on such a huge project.