I recently bought second Z9X player replacing my old X9S. Both players are on latest Beta version v6.4.42 firmware. Having both Z9X players with attached hard drives on my Gigabit network I discovered a serious problem. The players cannot reliably read files from each other attached drives. It takes at least 3 full minutes to start a movie, small single file about 20GB from second Zidoo Z9x. Once the movie starts it works as normal. I can pause, skip and change chapters. No issues at all. Larger UHD disk file structure 1000 files and 80GB size it just gets stuck forever on opening artwork screen. The same behavior is when the movie is started from HT or Media Center (the browser), long delay or no go. Both players work great when starting movies from local hard drives or any other network drives including SMB share from PC. The problem is only between 2 Zidoos. After further research I discovered that copying files from Zidoo Z9X SATA or USB attached drives to PC computer it hangs for a couple of minutes with the message "Time remaining: Calculating". Once this is passed it runs at about 60 MBps. It only happens on wired Gigabit network. Even checking on property of file takes a while. Switching both Zidoo's to wifi network eliminates this problem but of course it buffers on larger files. I tried to use different wires going through local switch only without any difference. Direct crossed cable between both players does not work. This is issue with Zidoo as NAS server over wired Gigabit network. Can anybody check this? Just copy a file from Z9X to PC and see if you get this "Calculating time remaining" message for couple of minutes like attached screenshot. PC and Zidoo need to be on wired Gigabit network. Moving files to Zidoo is not too bad, trying to copy from is the problem. Old X9S didn't have this problem and was connected to the same Gigabit LAN cable. SMB is enabled from Zidoo Quick Settings. Password or anonymous makes hardly any difference. Any help or suggestion would be appreciated.
After hours of testing I think I got to the bottom of it. Nobody commented on this issue and it could be unique to my setup with 2 Zidoo's and external hard drives but it could happen again and to anybody with multiple devices. The symptoms: - both players would get locked or corrupted on Samba server sending files out if connected on the same network. One player would work fine by itself. Second player still OK as long as Samba was not enabled. - Once both players get locked the only way to recover was to reboot. Disconnecting one player wouldn't recover the second unit. Both had te be rebooted and lock would repeat if connected on the same network again. Tested separate router on separate network, disconnected some of questionable devices from my network, disabled IP v6, deleted mapping information from Zidoo's and PC and multiple other combinations in process of narrowing it down. At the end the issue appeared to be related to specific IP addresses assigned to both players. I use DHCP Reservation Table in my main router to preassign static IP's to stationary devices like NAS stations, printers, cameras and media players to easily access them on the network. During recent upgrades to my media players I reused those IP's from old media players to new Zidoo's installed in the same location. This for some reason caused internal collision on versions or protocols for new Zidoo Samba server. Assigning new fresh IP's solved this issue. Maybe factory reset or full image restore would fix this as well. @mirror we need network reset function similar to what phones and old X9S had to reset OpenWrt. It would probably fix this issue instantly. After cleaning up, disconnecting, logging out and deleting all devices from Media Center SMB selection I still see couple of ghosts devices under SMB selection in HT when adding new source. There are stuck there greyed out and no way to delete. Since I got second Zidoo I manually mapped HT and fixed movies probably 10 times. Backup and restore does not work between different devices. It restored database and sources but at next scan if discovers all movies again. This needs manual fixing for unmached and some of the errors in matching. When changing IP's it automatically shows sources as disconnected. Copy data to new drive didn't work most of the time. It looks OK at first but first scan finds all movies unmatched again. I spent quite a bit of time troubleshooting this issue. It may help somebody else with similar problem.
