All you need to know about RTD1619BPD and RTD1619DR based players

@Nice Monkey
thank you very much for your email and the link to your NEO X thread I learned a lot about NEO X/S thanks to your "great" work

Merci Alain !

 

Hello, I just joined today and I considering purchasing the Z10 Pro. I've been searching for information on compatibility with an internal 18tb HHD, but I hearing different answers. My plan was to purchase an external drive, remove it and place in the bay. Has anyone had any luck with this? Any particular model (WD, Seagate)? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

If formatted SATA connected to a W10 PC it should work.

 

I don't know if HDD's of this size are noisier than smaller models but one person on my Facebook group bought a Seagate exos x16 for his Z1000 PRO and he is disappointed because the noise of the HDD's operation spoils the pleasure of watching a movie, now he is thinking of buying a NAS.

See you soon

 

They probably are noisier indeed. Todays external USB drives are all fully rubber mounted for that reason.

 

The Exos is an enterprise/NAS drive designed to be used in a datacenter where noise is not a concern. In general, 7,200 rpm drives will be noisier than 5,400 rpm drives. The WD Red Plus 10TB drives I bought a couple of years ago are 5,400 rpm and are much more quiet than my Exos X16 drives.

 

I strongly suggest you do some research to find out the exact hard drive model inside these ext drives (beware specs might change over time). I read some actually has a usb interface instead of SATA. on the other hand, some has helium drive inside. if you can find one, that would be perfect as they run cooler.

 

Exos drives are made for SAS so please don't mix them up with conventional NAS drives ;-) which are SATA

I am in telecommunications and big storages where latency matters are all SAS in fact, mostly that 2 drives are hot swappable. Capacity does not matter but reliability and speed.

best regards,

Armin

 

Hi i just bought a toshiba mg09 18TB. (In a cheap enclosure to use with my z9x)
It is an Enterprise Drive with 7200rpm.
Mostly it is quiet, except when reading or writing small files, than its pretty noisy.

good enough for my living room.

But: The Zidoo (or maybe android 9) doesnt play nice with drives bigger than 16tb.
Windows always said "damaged drive" , and found repairable errors. Drove me crazy..

Solition: Partition the drive to maximum of 14.5tb.
Clustersize 4096
No more damaged files.

 

Android uses a 32-bit register to address sectors causing the infamous HDD 2 TByte limit with 512 byte sectors. Using the 512e trick one can access just over 16TByte with 4K logical sectors. The cluster size is how big the OS writes the data single I/O in multiple sectors (up to 32K allowed but may increase slack for many small files).

But I may be mistaken as I see 18 TByte and 20 TByte drives advertised as 512e compatible. How they do that? Do they assume W10 64-bit OS using a 64-bit register for that? Practical testing confirmed the theoretical limit of 17.6 GByte with Android.

 

Thanks everyone! I appreciate the input. I've decided to just go with a Z9X and an external 16TB for now to play it safe.

 

Zidoo Neo S Gets another Award !

https://www.avforums.com/reviews/zidoo-neo-s-media-player-review.19520

 

Is there a reason why ZDMC fork is only using the native Z9X video player without menu playback? Using the Kodi Player for Menus does not make any sense for me because without hardware support this is way to slow for smooth playback. With HT4 it‘s working but in this case I can‘t use Kodi DB and HT does only work on this device.

 

@nemi
Don't have KODI installed so maybe somebody else can answer. As far as I am aware a program always call a single external player. No choice then.

@DELUCAS
Yes both Neo models are great value for money which is recognized by all reviews i have seen thus far.

The weakest Neo models point for me is MCH music playback which mostly is not part of the reviews as these all look at Stereo only. Being specifically a hybrid HiFi Music and Video player I regard that relevant. That and the Music Player features plus database are both FW driven so open for further improvements.
Just a matter of dedicating resources to it. I will keep helping by providing show examples as much as possible.

 

I have a Z9x connected to a NAS via NFS. Everything works great, except NFS does not refresh frequently enough. Often, I need to reboot/restart the device in order to refresh NFS. Are there settings or an app that I can change or use to force a NFS refresh or the frequency of a refresh?

 

I am unsure of what your question means. I have been using ZDMC 19.1 on my new Z1000 Pro (daily) as I found it so much easier to use, having spent 5 years using Kodi library functions on a HiMedia Q10Pro (and it's internal player).

You want it to use the Zidoo internal player for all 720p/1080p and 4K playback and this is what it does automatically (very well). This way, the VS10 engine with Dolby Vision, HDR10+ and full audio passthrough are available to you (unlike standard Kodi).
Kodi menus are still found using the "menu" key on the remote. I note it does use the Kodi player for old SD content i.e. DVD rips etc.

 

@Phil181
I think Nelson asks if you can still select playback With or Without BD Menu when using ZDMC.
Not using KODI/ZDMC myself and can't reply.

The Android HDD via SATA limit of 17.5 GByte seems to be confirmed. At least 2 persons were able to verify this exact limit. It's caused by using a 32-bit register for LBA (Logical Block Addressing) with a Android 32-bit OS. Added it to the main post.

 

If the question does relate to BD menus (not Kodi menus) then the answer is ZDMC does offer various file choices and Blu-ray menu when "play" is chosen from the Kodi menu.
I usually play mkv files, so I could only test on one BDMV folder rip that I have (83Gb Aquaman). The main movie file played perfectly when selected (Dolby Vision + TrueHD Atmos) from the choices but it did give an error message when "Blu-ray menu" was chosen.
I am unable to tell if this is common or not. I was able to switch from ZDMC to File Manager and open the full Blu-ray menu without any problems or errors, so there may be a bug in the way ZDMC/Kodi hands off to the Zidoo player.

 

I usually just use the file manager, not Kodi. I select NFS and it does sync with my NAS. I usually use the List view and I can vertically scroll, select, and play any files. My concern is that sometimes my NAS gets new files and these files are not reflected on Z9X. I need to power off and then power on or reboot/restart Z9X in order to refresh NFS. I am just wondering if there is a way to change the NFS settings on the underlying OS or just restart the NFS client, instead of the entire device.

 

The idea is to use an iso file with BR / UHD menu and native Zidoo player in ZDMC. This does not work. I can use the simple menu and just start the movie with the native player from ZDMC but if I do start BR menu playback the native Zidoo player is not used instead Kodi player is used to play BR menu without hardware acceleration. That means even a normal blu ray is stuttering. For me the playback of BR is much more interesting than just playing the main movie without all extras.