Completely lost setting up Z20 Pro

I'm a very recent purchaser of a Z20 Pro and am having great difficulty getting it to access files on my PC. I've now spent a number of hours attempting to share folders (including attempts to set up Samba) and have looked at multiple YouTube videos and none have provided me with the information I need. The users' manual appears pretty useless. (FWIW - I now have an Nvidia Shield with Plex loaded and I've been using this to access multiple drives and folders on my PC for the past couple of years. It's recently become somewhat dodgy with file buffering and I've purchased the Zidoo with the expectation it will be more robust in playing files (especially 4K). I also have purchased the Zidoo for its ability to play .iso and 3D.

I do not have any immediate expectations of purchasing a hard drive for use in the player. For now I am just "testing the waters" and access all my PC drives to play the number of movies I have. Hopefully someone here will be kind enough to direct me to a location where I might find this information (include any YouTube videos I might have missed. I've seen ones from Superdell-TV and Hatoraid Cowboy which appear to comment a lot about use of the player's internal hard drive and copying files to it but not much about accessing PC files using Ethernet. Am I missing something basic here?)

Thanks for any help anyone might provide. I'm good for another hour or so on this before this player goes back to Amazon. FWIW - I have no memory of such difficulty in setting up my Nvidia Shield.

Dennis

 

I'm going to give it one more day for a response and then will probably give up. I've already spent much too much time trying to set this unit up (especially now that my Shield seems to be reasonably healthy again after I've rebooted it). Interesting that there appears to be very little activity on this forum. Where does one go to get informative setup guides for all features (not just information on how to copy Blu-Rays). I assume I'm missing some basic piece of information - or perhaps the unit is as buggy as some on the users commenting on Hatoraid Cowboy's videos say it is.

 

It is buggy, because the software is far from complete I think only tinkerers should be buying these until there have been a couple more stable versions released.

That said however, you are diving into a worst case scenario of having your media spread across multiple disks on windows without having a proper NAS tieing them all together and managing the server side footwork. Plex and Jellyfin do this hard work for you, but in this case you have to make sure every disk is shared with SMB with the correct permissions, your network infrastructure needs to be properly configured with fixed IPs, map those shares on the zidoo with the IPs not domain.local names.

The best way to do this however is to re-do your server side setup, put all the media onto a NAS that can manage the SMB/NFS shares properly (windows is awful at it) and that will also allow you to combine everything down to one share location rather than multiple separate shares all mapped individually.

There is a way to access your media through Plex on the Zidoo, but it also requires mapping every location manually, which in your case would be very tricky to get working properly.
Until you can build a proper media server, I'd recommend putting a spare HDD into the Zidoo, enable the players inbuilt SMB server, and then access that via your PC to drop in the few movies and TV series you are currently watching, just manually update it every now and then.

 

Thanks for your reply. I was of course completely unaware that all this "heavy lifting" would be required to access media which I've had no difficulty playing using Plex on my Nvidia
Shield. I don't think any of this is made clear in any of the upfront product descriptions. As I noted in my original message, the product manual is completely useless and the forum here is fairly dead. Some of the YouTube videos are interesting, but they don't describe my particular situation - which I don't believe is that unique. (FWIW - I had hoped to be able to play my 3-D .iso files on the player, and some of the comments following the YouTube videos imply that this doesn't work. Anyway, Amazon's approved the return of my player and the $369 I paid for it and it's boxed up and ready to go back to the UPS Store. (An aside: my expectation is that the Zidoo would have given me a better viewing experience than that of my Shield - assuming I'd gotten it to work. Are players like the Dune easier to set up - or do they all depend upon having the media in a fairly central location? Discussion in this forum implies that the Zidoo's playback is better, but the Dune appears easier to set up. More research required...)

 

All other devices of the same sort really want your media to either be on a local HDD, USB, or on a properly set up network share that you manage manually. rather than with a media server app like plex or jellyfin.

The Shield can be made to play ISOs via KODI but its not a great experience and there isn't a lot of control over 3d modes for example that these types of boxes give you. best to stick to side by side or over/under for 3d on a shield. The Zidoos can absolutely play 3d ISOs including formats that other players struggle with like frame packed 3d or full resolution side by side.

The actual advantages of a dedicated player like a Zidoo over a do-all streamer like the shield is full control over video formats, bit depths, chroma sampling, frame rates, HDR conversions on the fly (DV to HDR10, SDR to HDR, HDR to SDR etc etc) you also get EDID spoofing to trick the player into thinking the screen is capable of things it might not support, which is very common requirement in higher end HT builds for example. The shield doesn't do HDR10+, it doesn't do AV1, or VP9.2 for example, so you have better format support even though they are mostly used for streaming and that is not what the device is built for. you are expected to plug files into the player.

Maybe wait another 6 months for some software updates and then have another look at higher end players.

 

Thanks. Much of this is language I don't understand. All of course is compromise and deciding what's "good enough" and I'm not sure how much time and effort I plan to put into getting a media player to work. I do not plan to put together a NAS as my multiple high capacity hard drives and home theater PC (which I've been using for years and has been upgraded on a number of occasions) have done reasonably well feeding my Plex setup. I have a number of 4K HDR files and all play fine (with Atmos audio as available) on my JVC RS1000 projector. I'll keep checking periodically to see what's out there but I probably won't venture too far in if the level of difficulty in the setup's not far less than what I've encountered so far. I'm out of here for now...