Please do not ask me why this has neven been communicated by Zidoo (...at least not to my knowledge here in the english speaking part of this forum), there seem to be some newer versions of ZDMC than the ZDMC 19.4 refferd to in the Support / Driver and Software Download Section of zidoo.tv. If you take the download link (for ZDMC 19.4): apidl.zidoo.tv/app/zdmc-19.4_rtk.apk provided on: https://www.zidoo.tv/Support/release_apk.html ....and replace the "19.4" with a "20.2" there is in fact a ZDMC 20.2 apk for download. From my experience up to now this works pretty well on my UHD3000. Status today (2024-02-18) this seems to be the latest version. 20.4 or 20.3 not available. @Team Zidoo: Could somebody please state if ZDMC 20.4 is worked on??
I wish there were more active communication about ZDMC as well. I can't ever find any new info about it.
They aren't actively working on it anymore, supposedly, but it really is just Kodi with the external player configs all set up, it will be replicated by the community pretty quickly if they discontinue it. Someone will pull the XML configs out and stick them onto Kodi 21 at some point and it wont take long to get working.
...this conform to my experience so far as well. I do not know anybody who would be willing and competend to simply "pull the XML configs and stick them onto Kodi 21". @Faceman2k24 : Would you??
It's not as simple as that - I've the above by unpacking and repacking with the correct XML in the correct place and it does not work, as there needs to be some code changes too. So, we wait for Zidoo I'm afraid.
I've been using 20.2 for a bit now and the only thing that really bugs me is how it doesn't mark items as watched. I'm having to do it manually and hold-selecting is kind of wonky in the UI for some reason. I did some searching and it seems like this is a known issue with ZDMC. Does anyone know of a possible fix?
Bugger. I know on previous version of Kodi the external player mods (like the DSPLAYER mod for Madvr on PC, and this one for Zidoo hardware) were deeper than just writing a XML config, but in Kodi 21 External players are natively supported, though they would likely require entirely new configs to be written. so I'd say it's possible but likely beyond me. I'll have a poke in the APK files and see what I can see. 20.2 does seem stable to me so perhaps we will get another version when Kodi 21 for android is a few versions into its stable run, its still RC at the moment. HT4 is awful, deeply, violenty, awful compared to a moderately customised Kodi setup with a clean skin and some planning so I hope we get some level of support, at least until the dedicated HT app is up to scratch.
Kodi 21 Stable was released over the weekend. fingers crossed there's still some development happening for us. That said, the vast majority of updates in V21 are player updates, negated by the Zidoos external player, so it's not the end of the world if we don't get major advancements on ZDMC. Though there are some great quality of live updates to the library management, like much better movie versioning control for films with multiple variants/cuts/releases. I've got it running on one of my shields and the ability to switch/convert DV profiles on the fly is pretty cool.
So I'm probably going to get slammed for this but: With all the changes to the internal Kodi player and support for DV in Kodi 21 what does ZDMC get us? I understand it links to the Zidoo player (external from Kodi), but what additional benefit does it still provide. It seems like Kodi is catching up.
the Zidoo players don't use common Android supported video hardware so the apps don't actually "see" the full stack of supported output formats or full hardware acceleration. no access to the VS10 functions, colourspace conversions etc, apps cant even do framerate switching on this hardware as it is fundamentally different to a device like a shield where the apps have more direct hardware access. If you load up the regular KODI (even V21) or Plex or Jellyfin or any other popular media player app you end up with things like DV support not being detected, framerate matching not working, some codecs not being hardware decoded etc. Running apps is not what these were built for. The only app with full access to the hardware in the Zidoo is the built in player, and since we don't like the default library management or layout we are using ZDMC which lets us use Kodi's skins and library management while still having full video format support and video quality. If you want to run regular Kodi properly the 2019 shield is still the go to there, but you don't get the ability to do things like convert DV to HDR10 on the fly, or convert everything to LLDV (appleTV supports that though, but its system wide and not always the best option). basically the Zidoo saves us from buying HDFury boxes or even pre-processors like Lumagen but has some drawbacks in third party app support.
...why should somebody get slammed for asking a valid question;-)? Short answer: Full Hardware support. Long Answer: While the Zidoo Player (wich is used by ZDMC) is specifically designed to run on the Hardware (GPU, RAM, CPU...) of your Zidoo device, Kodi including it´s internal Player are more general applications. Kodi is designed to run on various different systems therefore the Kodi-Player will never fully utilyze the Hardware of your Zidoo Player. This is clearly visible performancewise. When i play back large UHD Video Files on my Zidoo UHD3000: - they run perfectly smooth with the Zidoo Player - but extremely unsmooth with the Kodi Player even if the hardware is identical in both cases.
Out of curiosity: Has anybody here ever tried out replacing ZDMC with Kodi + PCF (plyercorefactory.xml) like described here: https://kodi.wiki/view/External_players ? Currently i have no clue, what path/filename should be used here to redirect Kodi to the Zidoo Player exe of my UHD3000.
I've fiddled with it too and there's an extra couple of changes made to the app itself and some other XML configs in there than just a standard external player config. likely something simple due to permissions but for now 20.2 is stable as it gets and the many of the new features of 21.0 don't really even apply for us anyway since we bypass most of it anyway.
