Former Zappiti User Switched to Z2600 Comparisons and a question

I recently switched from a Zappiti Signature to a Zidoo Z2600. My impressions are as follows:

Zappiti hardware is superior except for the audio video chip. The new chip in the Z2600 significantly improves the picture quality. I am not sure there is any significant difference in the sound. I think the Neo Alpha is probably a better match in hardware to the Zappiti Signature than the Z2600.

I think the Zidoo music player is better in some ways than the way Zappiti handles music files. Overall I prefer the Zidoo software to the Zappiti in this area, although I do think the Zidoo interface is a little clunky.

Zidoo Home Theater 4 is nowhere near as good as the Zappiti Video software. I am still learning how to operate the HT4 software, but it doesn't seem to handle iso files of TV series which is a significant shortcoming as opposed to the Zappiti software. The movie functionality works OK and I find it acceptable, but I still prefer the Zappiti, but that may change as I grow more accustomed to the movie functionality in HT4.

Now to the question I have. In Zappiti as in HT4 it is not uncommon for the software not to recognize a given movie when data scraping. In Zappiti I could re-identify the movie and manually tell the software which entry in TMDB.com to use for the movie instead of the incorrect entry or even when the software found no entry at all. If this functionality exists in HT4, I have been unable to find it. Does this functionality exist and if so how do I access it?

Finally, I have a large collection of DVD Audio and Blu-Ray Audio disks which I play through my home theater system. Neither Zappiti or HT4 seem to handle these disks well. You can play them as movies in either system, but there is no way to put them in the video wall that I can find that matches the functionality of movies. I realize that TMDB.com does not allow these disks to be placed in their database so the software doesn't have anywhere to scrape information from. Zappiti does have a way to put them in the Video Wall with a placeholder entry which simply shows the title entered by the user. HT4 doesn't seem to have this capability. I would greatly appreciate an elegant solution to this problem, but one probably doesn't exist. Zappiti allowing the user to put a placeholder entry in the video wall is probably the best solution currently possible. Adding this functionality to HT4 would be a big boon to me.

One last thought, I have been a Roon Fan and User for several years. Zappiti was allegedly working on making their players Roon Ready but this never materialized. I know the previous generation of Zidoo players was Roon Ready. I am hoping the new generation will also be made Roon Ready soon.

 

Yes you can do a manual search. Long press OK on movie and it will pop up a context sensitive menu. Select 'Re-match' You can either select the name of the file, type in your own or use the IMDB ID number.

 

Thanks for the tip. I finally figured out how to do this. First you have to unmatch the video on the movies list. Then you have to go to the unmatched list and do as you indicated. I had been trying to find the re-match function in the movies list. For my first attempt to load videos I used my file of over 600 music videos and musicals. The software correctly matched only about 50% of the videos. I began rematching on the unmatched screen after checking all the videos on the movie list. I successfully rematched about 50 to 60 videos when suddenly I could not match any more videos no matter what I did. Is there some kind of limit on how many videos you can rematch in a given time?

 

In my experience you don't have to un match an incorrect scraped movie to correct it. If its wrongly matched just follow my instructions. As for limits I don't know as I have a fairly small movie and TV library.

 

No limit I'm aware of - The largest library I've tested is 4000 movies.

If the files are named the same as TMDB (obviously with omissions for illegal characters) I find matching accuracy very good - anecdotally, probably over 90%. It has trouble with numbers (1917, 2012 etc) for some reason, but generally very good.

Never had it stop at 50-60 though.

 

Tonight for some unexplained reason the re-match function suddenly began working again. I am down from 218 unmatched files to 29. My player still does not seem to be populating the video wall with posters and backdrops. There are a number of videos for which I know posters and backdrops are available on TMDB which have not been populated despite having been matched for more than 48 hours. After using the Zappiti re-match function I find the Ziddo re-match function to be very very unfriendly. This is an area of the HT4 user interface that could use a lot of work.

 

Not really sure what's going on there - scraping and poster population happens concurrently - it's not like you have to wait for it.

However, the first time you open the poster wall you need to scroll down to populate/cache all the posters and there is an issue of performance for large libraries in certain views

http://forum.zidoo.tv/index.php?threads/ht4-slow-poster-refresh-issue.96356/

Personally I always use local artwork and local NFOs.