KODI - ZDMC - MATRIX 19.5 - NEXUS 20 - 21

My Z9X reboot while streaming DV using ZDMC (Add-on -Fen + Real-debrid). Anyone having the same problem.

 

Yes, I simply deleted ZDMC off my machine after it did that 3 times. Also tried the diff. skins mentioned here but wasnt not liking it overall. Happy with good ol HT4.0.

 

HT4.0 has its own issues, but I primarily use it anyway. I'm only using ZDMC for the files that HT4.0 won't play, i.e. 10bit 720p h.264 files, and older AVI files. I didn't bother with metadata scraping in ZDMC. It took me long enough to get all the metadata matched up right in HT4.0. I don't feel like managing it in 3 different places (i also use Plex on a TV directly, so I manage that library too.)

For 4k files, especially DV, I'd probably stick to HT4.0, yea.

 

I use media companion to manage my collection with local NFOs and artwork. HT4.0 works 99.9% in matching movies, it only struggles with ' in the file name and is also very fast in scraping. Same applies to ZDMC...

 

Yea the issue is that my old TV show file names weren't set up correctly, so that's on me. Despite this, somehow Plex was able to match like 95% of it, whereas HT4.0 only matched like 50% of it. Not sure why Plex has such better matching. That's about the only thing Plex does better in my opinion though, ha.

 

@Markswift2003 Hey Mark, not sure if you can exert some influence and see if Zidoo will release an update version of ZDMC? I think it will take out some of the heat that is all over the forum at the moment.....just a thought.

 

As I've said before many times ZDMC is a deprecated product and hasn't been officially supported for many years. It's kind of a pet project and gets updated as and when and isn't part of development.

Personally I dislike Kodi - I described Plex recently as a bloated mess and I see Kodi in a similar light - it always feels like someone threw a load of code at a teenager's bedroom wall and kept what sticks.

 

Understood.

 

I have a question. Why AFR works only in ZDMC & HT4? Is it a hardware thing? Or it can be enable by a software update?

 

AFR in settings relates to the Zidoo hardware player. If software doesn't call that player, AFR in settings will have no effect and must be handled by the software itself.

 

Nova Video Player will also call the internal player, so you can use that as well if you want. It scrapes quite quickly and works with Trakt as well.

I'm still counting on the team to release a 20/21 version of ZDMC so we can use proper DV/HDR10/HDR10+ tags.

 

Tried it out yesterday, it’s brilliant. Who needs HT4 and it’s bugs if you can have this?

 

All skins are similar once you change from default tiles of “Estuary” skin. I use "Aeon Nox: SiLVO" highly customizable and easily installs from official Kodi repo.

I have both, HT for best selection around 450 titles and Kodi for the rest over 2k. There is good and bad for both. One thing I like with HT is multiple versions of the same movie like 3D, UHD, Director Cut, etc. are all on the same movie page with icons and clean path with file name in case I didn't take my time to customize squares for movies A, B, C.
Kodi will make separate movie page for every file. Some of them get put into collections (but still separate pages) and some are just single movies. Kodi will do a better job scarping movies but you would need to manually clean it up similar to HT at the end if you want to have it right.

 

All my movies and series are scraped and managed exclusively with tinyMediaManager.

So I use ZDMC and HT4 just for read only / displaying things.

HT4 acts weird with series. Like series with one season have the number in the title or sometimes new episodes of a running series are not added to the existing season but are added as a new series/season with one episode. And you can not fix it for good (at least I can not), I experimented with removing and re-adding. I mean come on, it’s already scrapped just read it and don’t do funny stuff. But…it does it’s own thing.

Kodi / ZDMC just works. And it is fully customizable.

 

The way I see it (and I did try to drop a hint to Mark), if the Zidoo Devs don't have the time/bandwidth, or, inclination, to work on HT4 (and I might add the Audio Player Skin), then why not release an up-to-date version of ZDMC, but as well as calling the Zidoo video player as the external player (com.android.gallery3d), see if they can add support to call the Zidoo audio player for ZDMC too?

By default, Kodi, because of standard Android limitations on the Zidoo box is limited to something like 44.1kz for (non bitstream) music playback, vs the Zidoo internal music player.

It's highly unlikely that the Zidoo Dev's can match the efforts of a front end/skinning/scrapping that Kodi can, by the sheer number of Devs that work on those things for Kodi.

Just my 2 cents.

 

does ZDMC have watched status, resume etc?

 

No but it will resume from where you left based on Zidoo player app.

 

Watched status is a manual task, at the moment.....

 

Since ZDMC uses Zidoo player by default, it keeps the watched data within HT4. It does resume from where it is stopped, same as HT4.

As noted above, watched status has to be manually done with the remote: except if Kodi player was used (for DVD rips etc or manually selected), when it also saves within the " In Progress" section on the main page.

 

The difficult part will be getting the Kodi overlay to work with the Zidoo player. As it stands now I’ll just be happy with ZDMC Nexus because of the proper DV/HDR tags.