So what Happened to the New 2022 / 2023 Zidoo Line ?

I wasn't an "Android Experiment" - Dune are a Russian company with a presence in Kyiv so not difficult to work out why they went the OEM route for a while.

Dune subcontract manufacturing and OS layer to a third party (the same one that R_Zappiti use) and they write their own application layer and applications.

The new Dune 8K boxes definitely do not process Dolby Vision FEL. Image quality from the AML SOC is on a par with the Realtek 1619 with a couple of caveats.

VS10 implementation in AML is slightly different to Realtek and does have a couple of issues - however Dune are using an older version. Newer versions improve on this.

There's also a weird Dolby Vision licencing thing going on with Dune where the box must be connected to the internet in order that Dolby Vision works (so the licence can be confirmed as valid) and if not it falls back to the HDR10 layer or VS10 conversion in the case of Profile 5.

Not sure if the R_Zappiti version does this or not as I don't have one of those.

 

Wow, that really sucks! Does it check on boot or on playback?

 

It checks on boot so if you boot with internet and then remove the connection, Dolby Vision still plays. (Don't know if this is time restricted)

If you boot with no internet, DV falls back to HDR10 and you get a message saying "No Internet access. Failed to check Dune HD licence. Playback is limited to HDR10".

But if you boot with no internet and then connect afterwards, playback is ok.

 

Here is how HDMI works. Below is from tcentral but if you search for "does HDMI 2.0 still exist" and you will see from multiple sources that they made this decision in 2021. Everything can be 2.1 now, I see zero 2.1 features, particularly QMS for either Zidoo or Dune. Dune has a feature where it shows a black screen for 1 second this way any HDMI syncing flashes or whatever don't display. Not sure if Zidoo does that or not.

Maybe some people play games on these but I doubt it. ALLM (auto low latency mode( is for gaming. Doubt Android supports VRR but you never know but it doesn't matter because neither do.

I'm thinking about just getting the cheapest zideoo model from the latest generation. It's cheaper, I have zero interest in 8K or 4K120fps, only AV1 and this does everything I need. I'm not a fan of the side SATA cable connector but the model with the internal bay (looks like a smaller dune solo) is quite a bit more. Can anyone confirm if this model supports USB audio and is SmartTubeNext pre-installed? If so that would be greatly appreciated. Also, if anyone can comment on the UI speed navigation improvements compared to the previous realtek models that would be great. Thanks!

We contacted HDMI.org who are the “HDMI Licensing Administrator” to ask some questions about this new standard, seek clarification on several questions we had and discuss the Xiaomi display we mentioned above. Here is what we were told:

HDMI 2.0 no longer exists, and devices should not claim compliance to v2.0 as it is not referenced any more
The features of HDMI 2.0 are now a sub-set of 2.1
All the new capabilities and features associated with HDMI 2.1 are optional (this includes FRL, the higher bandwidths, VRR, ALLM and everything else)
If a device claims compliance to 2.1 then they need to also state which features the device supports so there is “no confusion” (hmmmm)

 

Where is this info regarding DV profile 7 FEL support coming from? Can you link the document?

 

Clutching at straws....

People tend to misread the deliberately obtuse marketing from Dune:

"The media player supports direct playback of Dolby Vision profile 7 FEL double-track and double-layer files. This is the most advanced Dolby Vision format. The media player plays video in this format using both tracks/layers. The important Dolby Vision information from the second track/layer (Dolby Vision RPU metadata) is transmitted to TV together with video data from the first track/layer. The passed video data uses 10-bit color depth - the maximum color depth supported by OLED-panels in OLED TVs, i.e. this fully uses the capabilities of OLED TVs. Combined with the full use of Dolby Vision metadata this gives an excellent Dolby Vision picture on the TV screen."

Typical Dune obfuscation - it's of course correct - it says the video from the first layer is sent with the RPU data from the second layer, but it's written in such a way that it fools some people into thinking that the FEL video is processed. It of course isn't.

You can't blame them though - that's what marketing is for

 

Figured... thanks Mark. They all indeed have great marketing and has me confused/fooled at times as well.

 

You were right, I was wrong. I have no issues admitting it. I had just never heard of a scenario like that before. After going through some avsforum threads, the new models doesn't do FEL properly and doesn't allow Dolby Vision without an Internet connection. This isn't an issue on my older model, I verified. People trying to defend dune said it was because of "Dolby Vision licensing" which I don't believe. Seems like they want it connected to the Internet for "some" reason. The S922X chip isn't powerful enough, you need a S922X-J or S922X-K. In fact it seems like CoreElec just released a new version allowing this in the last week and yes, it's true FEL. I will probably go with Zidoo but I'm going to give myself some time to think about it. I still have the Dune Solo which does everything but AV1 and has Android 9, not 11. I could just see scenarios where CoreElec has issues and I don't want to spend my time fixing those issues as they randomly pop up which isn't an issue with Zidoo.

Another problem with going the CoreElec route is it seems like your stuck with an optimized version of Kodi. That and every box I could find with one of those chips was on AliExpress and could be preloaded with Malware or not, you just don't know at this point if it's AOSP based, that can't be removed and I don't really feel like having to connect via ADB to find out if it is or not as ASOP boxes reskinned, especially the ones below 50.dollars, probably have malware.. At least Armlogic and realtek products don't have this issue because after some research I will never buy anything with a RockChip or AllWinner chip again. In the wired article they mentioned 8 devices known to be pre-installed with malware. What's worse is I did a search for each product and 7 of the 8 listed are still up on Amazon. This was discovered over a year ago. What sucks is it's slipped in during manufacturing so some models may or may not be secure. Below is a picture someone posted on avsforum verifying that it falls back to HDR without an Internet connection. This is a HUGE red flag for me but people there don't seem to think Russia and China are a cyber security threat. Over 20 million Android devices are currently infected and trend nicro's numbers back it up.

People on avsforum said I was just "paranoid" with one person saying he had personality monitored traffic using Wireshark on 100's of Android boxes and none had any issues, including the ones listed above. Either he's lying or he doesn't know how to use Wireshark because the person who originally discovered it just used pihole to see all the domains it was phoning home to in China.

The main purpose of these is local media playback but if I have to be concerned to the internet it makes the entire solution pointless IMO. Yes, it still plays but not to it's full capabilities. Legitimate treaming boxes are cheap and I have zero problems using 2 devices.

lTT (Linus tech tips) did a video on this and brought attention to it so this particular operation appears to have been shut down, at least for now and the guy who originally found it started a GitHub topic about it. One of the discussions is literally someone in on the scheme trying to say the guy way lying. It's actually a pretty funny conversation considering it was right after the botnet was taken down.

CoreELEC 21.0-Omega (April 9th, 2024)

Dolby Vision will be supported on Amlogic-ne and Amlogic-ng with Kodi Omega on certain Amlogic devices like Homatics/Dune R 4K Plus, RockTek G2 or Nokia 8010. Other devices on Amlogic-ng like Ugoos AM6+ or Minix NEO U22-XJ (Max) equiped with S922X-J will support Dolby Vision with profile 7 FEL as well

 

Last post on this topic but I will never buy a Dune product again. Everytime you play a video it reaches out to AWS and Google cloud services over port 443 and to some sites in the Netherlands on port 80. The person that posted it said AWS was possibly used to decode Atmos and verify DV licensing.

Has anyone ever heard of a media player or streaming box requiring AWS to decode Atmos? I sure haven't but I've obviously been wrong before. Pretty positive I'm going with Zidoo at this point. I'm certainty not buying another Dune device, that's for sure. Thanks for the info and correcting my earlier posts that were clearly wrong. I can understand the files-dune for indexing but the rest seems very odd possibly Google is valid because of Android but why AWS is needed I just can't understand. Below is from avsforum.The poster seems to think this is normal regarding the Dolby Vision not working without an Internet connection because it has to validate licensing......

<==
I think it's concerning but if it's mandated by Dolby licensing what can you do... not use DV? Not really an option now is it.

I monitor traffic on my network with PfSense and snort. Dune Pro One 8K+ is a fairly quiet device, it even shuts down the network interface when it goes to sleep which is disappointing actually, you can't wake it from the remote app.

Initiated a DV episode of Fallout and went to review traffic. I see a bunch of secure 443 calls to Google & Amazon servers and a few port 80 calls to servers in the Netherlands, Amsterdam in particular to hdtv. ru & files. dune-hd. com both seems to be a Dune focused sites and possibly something to do with the My collection app and triggered anytime the dune is booted to My collection.

I know Amazon Web Service is one service that can be used to encode Atmos and it's possible this is the service that's being called for Dolby Vision licensing, its hostname was ec2-34-195-175-66.compute-1.amazonaws.com and it's based in Ashburn, Virginia. I see no calls to Russia, albeit Russian owned perhaps but based in Amsterdam. Could have missed it but I kind of doubt it, spent an hour looking at over 60 addresses. I've also never seen the Dune show up on a Snort dump which would detect any sort of malware, suspicious DNS, fota or file transfers
-->