If that would work, one could combine zidoos great playback capabilities with the advantages of a central media server. Has anyone tried it?
In case someone is interested in that topic. I gave it a try on my Z9S. It works. I used "Jellyfin for Kodi" not "JellyCon" and I used its "native mode" (for raw SMB access). My summary: The internal zidoo media player is used reliably for all media (thus, playbacks everything just fine as if started from the official home theater app) The Jellyfin library is mapped onto the Kodi library, i.e. not reflecting the libraries configured in Jellyfin, perfectly. Mine are quite similar. So they map quite good. But there are still some differences. For example tv series are listed in the movies library, too. But maybe I didn't figure out to configure it properly. The view state is not synced. Even worse: As it's using the built-in player, home theater will recognize it. JellyFin not. So JellyFin and home theater show different view states (out of sync). You can even apply skins/themes. Some make the device pretty slow, though. With the newer Zidoo models this might not a problem anymore maybe. Embuary is very slow. I've setup an own Jellyfin library for movie collections in Jellyfin. I created it on my own. Some movies are inside multiple collections. Quite similar to playlists. While the library can be accessed (and put to some main menu with some Jellyfin themes), there's no play button for those movies in those collections. So you have to search them through some normal collection. While the Add-on mode reflects your Jellyfin library better, it's slower and most importantly it doesn't use Zidoos built-in player. Hence, many playback issues and transcodings happening on your media server instead on the Zidoo. There's also the Jellyfin AndroidTV Client from @andy22. It has the benefit of syncing the view states, showing the actual JellyFin library as configured and is also super fast. But it's not as polished as the ZDMC or home theater apps. And I had some issues with iso files. Thus, for most Jellyfin users his fork is the better solution, atm. If the Add-on mode of "Jellyfin for Kodi" would become intelligent enough to not transcode movies of any format and recognize all of Zidoos capabilites properly, ZDMC and this addon might become a pretty nice solution for Jellyfin'd Zidoo players in the future, too. Inheriting all the benefits of Kodi, too. For people who don't even know why to use something like Jellyfin, at all: it provides you a central media server hosted by you (e.g. on a NAS). And through this you're able to stream media to every device on your LAN. If it's not compatible, it gets transcoded on the fly. If you're familiar with network security you could even stream your media through the internet. It also stores the meta data about your media files (title, year, genre, description, posters ....) and meta data you applied expplicitly or implicitly (libraries, collections, your view state (viewed or not, or while viewing the: current view progress of a file), your media ratings, tags etc.) are stored centrally and available to all your devices. It's also suitable for multi-user scenarios. And you can make backups easily (I run them nightly with my NAS). Personally, I mostly care about the meta data backup, not the media itself. Yes, meta data. Fore me it's worth way more then most of the media itself, which can be recovered easier, than lost meta data. I lost the meta data stored within the home theater app on my Zidoo multiple times, already. Literally, loosing hours (or days?) of setting up the library in the home theatre app such that everything works (all media is recognized correctly etc.). With Jellyfin and a proper backup solution, it's quite unlikely to occur. After all, those 2 integrations aren't the only ones one could think of. They're just two well known ones. I really like the home theater app but setting up and loosing libraries over and over again is just annoying. So why not build a native integration between the home theater app and Jellyfin ;-) ? That'd being said, well working Zidoo and Jellyfin integrations are very welcome. They provides the best of both worlds.
have you tried jellycon, too? I want to use ZDMC with plex or jellyfin. Plexkodiconnect doesnt work with zidoos internal player, so the idea was to use jellyfin with one of the addons. Do you know what works better?
@Sunset1982 I think I tried Jellycon shortly and it should work, too. I can't provide any details. Based on the official documentation "Jellyfin for Kodi" sounded more useful for me due to the better and faster integration of the library into the Kodi user interface.
