v1.2.22, v1.2.22_G Beta version for Z9X 8K/Z30 PRO/Z3000 PRO/UHD8000 (UPDATE)

Hello, could you please provide a video of it?

 

Do you mean long press the zip file in usd update?
BTW which version of firmware should i update with? Version v1.2.05 to v1.2.20 or v1.2.20 to v1.2.22 (Google play version)..

 

https://www.mcbluna.net/wp/zidoo-mo...mware-download/#Z9X-8K_v1_2_10_G_to_v1_2_20_G

 

1. When you say "I can watch a couple of hours before it starts" does this mean after several files during those couple of hours, or one file that's at least two hours long?

2. Have you checked the box temperature when this happens? These boxes run a lot hotter than the old Realteks - my test Z9X 8K sits on top of an HDFury Vertex 2 which generates its own heat and the Zidoo used to get alarmingly hot (I 3D printed some standoffs to keep them separate, which fixed the issue).

3. Also, during this period, was the screensaver allowed to kick in when content was paused? There's a nasty (and long reported) bug in the screensaver that will cause this kind of behaviour - workaround is to disable screensaver during playback (from the player context menu).

The Vertex reports frame rate, and for 24000/1001 content it always reports 23.973 to 23.974 which although looks incorrect, is absolutely fine - I've never seen a media player/BluRay player/UHD BluRay player that hit's 23.976 exactly - they're always between 23.972 and 23.974.

But if framerate is greater than the file framerate by even a thousandth, because the audio is fixed, it will repeat one video frame to compensate in intervals according to:

1/(x -y*60)

Where x = playback framerate and y = file framerate

For framerates thousandths under, audio frames compensate and video neither loses nor gains any frames so playback is perfect.

I haven't seen this behaviour in any media player since the Realtek 1295 (and that was fixed by Zidoo at the time*) so given the results above, I honestly don't think there's an intrinsic framerate issue (Integer framerates are reported exactly by the vertex, 60000/10001 reported as 59.936 and 30000/1001 as 29.968, again, thousandths under and absolutely fine)




* Zidoo were the only company of the main 3 at the time who fixed this on the 1295 and that was because I pestered them into buying a Vertex and is kind of the reason I got involved with them to start with! Starting with the 1296 and on through the 1619 SoCs and every AML SoC I've tested, framerates were correct out of the box.

 

much appricated..

 

Let me first of all apologies for the length of this write up. I wanted to document everything as well as I can, just in case there is something in there that could help.

For the last few days, I've been watching a series with episodes that are nearly an hour long. All of them have the same format / encoding as detailed above in the mediainfo.

• On Sunday I rebooted the Zidoo and played music with the TV off for about 8 hours.
• Then I turned on the TV and watched a 1hr 45min movie that was 1080p h264 with EAC3 Atmos. No stutter or lipsync issues, however this was an animated kids movie, so nay lipsync would have been easy to miss.
• I pressed stop near the end of the movie, turned the TV off and left the Zidoo on.
• On Monday, I played music for about 10 hours without turning the TV on.
• I turned the TV on and watched episodes 1 & 2 of the series, back to back without pausing. No stutter, but lipsync seemed to be a little off so I added a 125ms delay.
• I pressed stop at the end of episode 2, turned the TV off and left the Zidoo on.
• On Tuesday, I played music for about 12 hours without turning the TV on.
• I turned the TV on and watched episodes 3, 4 & 5 of the series, back to back . I paused long enough during the episode 3 for the screen saver to start. No stutter experienced at any point. At the start of episode 3 lipsync seemed to be off again so I tweaked the settings and this time needed about a 250ms delay.
• I pressed stop at the end of the episode 5, turned the TV off and left the Zidoo on.
• On Wednesday, I played music for about 12 hours without turning the TV on.
• I turned the TV on and watched episodes 6, 7 & 8 of the series, back to back . I paused a few times, but not long enough for the screen saver to start at any point. At the start of episode 6 lipsync seemed to be off again, but this time quite badly. I went back to episodes 1 & 4 to check, and the lipsync problem there was the same as episode 6. I experimented a little and eventually found that having a 0 offset for lipsync gave the best result. This was now the case on all three episodes I tested, including episodes from previous two days that previously needed different lipsync offset, but now did not need any offset at all. I then watched episode 6 and about 10 minutes in, a slow full screen pan started dropping frames randomly and became jerky. Once the scene changed, the playback was smooth for about 5 seconds and then random frame drops, momentary freezes and skips and generally crappy frame rate control as you would get when there isn't buffer space to achieve proper sync. The picture seemed to be slaved off the audio PTS clock since the audio did not exhibit any audible pops, clicks or glitches. Seeking backwards would replay the same passage without issues, but eventually the stuttering would return. Anywhere between a few seconds and 10 or 15 minutes. I tried stopping the playback and starting again. It was no different from there on, good for a few minutes then stuttering returned. I watched episodes 6, 7 & 8 like this, seeking 15 seconds back every time the problem started. It was frustrating.
• I pressed stop at the end of the episode 8, turned the TV off and left the Zidoo on.
• Today (Thursday), I played music for about 6 hours without turning the TV on.
• I'll see what happens later tonight.

While watching all of the episodes of the series, I would sometimes turn subtitles on or off, or sometimes switch between forced and English subtitles. I'm watching these episodes at night, while the kids are asleep, and don't want to turn it up too loud and wake them up. When the characters mumble and I can't quite make out the conversation, I may briefly (1 to 5 minutes) turn on the subtitles. I have not noticed the subtitle switching having any impact on the stuttering issue, other than the fact that seeking back after the subtitles are on will (temporarily) stop the stuttering if it was already there.

No, I have not checked the temperature, but am very confident that heat is not an issue. The Z9X 8K is on an open shelf on it's own. No devices in the shelves under it or above it. 12 cm space above, 30cm on left, 10cm on right, open back cabinet. It's winter here and ambient temperature has not exceeded 20℃. The same hardware configuration with firmware 1.2.01 performed flawlessly for months in ambient temperatures in excess of 35℃ on some days.

I don't have the screensaver disabled - it's left at the default Daydream and using only the factory provided images. Timeout is 5 minutes. As you can see from the journal entries above, I don't think that the screensaver played a role in this, however I'll try turning it off anyway.

Yes, that kind of pacing control is easy to spot. Only one frame and it happens at regular intervals. This issues looks different to that. It's random(ish) video discontinuities, often causing jumps of several frames and it happens at irregular intervals.

The best I can describe it, based on my experience writing device drivers that dealt with this kind of problem, is that of the video decoder being unable to deliver the frames fast enough OR the presentation time stamps (PTS) being mangled. Of course, there could be other causes too, such as lock contention or buffer/packet reordering. Without seeing (and understanding) the source/architecture, it's just speculation.

I've worked on Broadcom based systems and they had some nice features in their SDK to achieve sync without discontinuities. Unfortunately there were so many possible combinations of features and not all of them well tested, that writing drivers for those systems was a challenge. Then again, the boxes I worked on were a lot more complicated that the Z9X 8K. We supported DVB, HDMI-IN, real-time transcoding, multi-streaming, standards conversion, deinterlacing, upscaling, picture processing and PiP and all with eight incoming and four outgoing HD streams. Going to 4K meant that you had to choose whether you'd boot into a mode that supports PiP or transcoding. You could not have both because the chipset could not address enough RAM to do both at the same time.

Anyway, I'm starting to veer off topic here...

tl;dr: Over the course of a couple of days, I've gone from not having stutter, but having the need for different lipsync on a daily basis, to having stutter (currently without the need for lipsync adjustment, but that may change later tonight when I try again). None of this is dependent on the files. What works one day, works differently the day after and doesn't work the next day.

I'd really love to go back to 1.2.01 and try to retest exactly the same scenario.

 

much appreciated your provided firmware abnd it working well now.

 

Brilliant - thanks for the write up - and hopefully it's pointing at the screensaver as the issue. Not so much for your initial perception of lipsync because that was before the screensaver kicked in, but afterwards I believe the box remained on for the duration.

When screensaver activates during playback, it reverts to the UI mode (resolution and dynamic range mode) instead of remaining in the current video mode. This causes an unwanted HDMI resync and there have been forum reports that this also causes stuttering on resuming the video. Initially I didn't see this, but I have since confirmed that behaviour and to clear it requires a reboot.

This has been in my bug report for a long time along with a procedure to replicate it ( @Eki Shaw - FYI, this is on page 11 of the current pdf) but so far not fixed. Previous players did not exhibit this.

As I said above, the workaround is simply to disable playback screensaver as below:




I wasn't expecting heat to be an issue, but it was worth asking as it can cause unexpected behaviour in most electronics and as I say, these boxes tend to run hotter than previous ones.

 

With the current firmware, there is no such option in the Advanced/More Settings Menu. Am I missing something ?
UPDATE : I found why. It's because in General Settings / Display / Screensaver , I disabled it.

 

That screenshot is from v1.2.22 so it's definitely there.

If you disable in the main settings you're disabling the whole screen saver whereas if you do it from the context menu you're just disabling it during video playback.

 

Samba transfers are catastrophic... With the z9x (which I no longer have) my transfers were up to 100 mo/s, whereas with the 8k I don't exceed 30 mo/s...
Will this be corrected?

 

In my case, the copy speed via SMB dropped from 100-110 MB/sec for Z9X to 90 MB/sec for Z30Pro (although six months ago the speed for Z30Pro was 75-85, perhaps the developers tried to do something to increase it). And I still hope that the speed will be increased by the developers to the level of Z9X. Although there are suspicions that this is a weak point of the new processor, but I would really like to be dissuaded

 

It resysnchs because theres 2 different file types in the 4 SS files ,1 4k image and 3 1080p images

As i suggested a couple times , if your UI is set to 4k ,then delete the 3 x 1080p files and add in some 4k hdr images ,and this helps a lot

 

I assume most people will have replaced those images - I use a few hundred 1920x1080 fanart images.

But regardless of the images used, the screensaver always adopts the UI mode of resolution, frame rate and HDR mode.

In your example above, yes the resolution doesn't have to change (assuming you're watching 4K content and have a 4K UI), but framerate and HDR mode will change unless your UI matches those of the content too.

My UI mode is 3840x2160p60 SDR so the screensaver is always presented in 3840x2160p60 SDR.

If I change UI mode to 1280x720p50 HDR10, the screensaver is always presented in 1280x720p50 HDR10.

Image size makes no difference to how the screensaver is presented - to stop HDMI resync you'd have to set the UI mode to the same as the content in all three respects.

As I say, the workaround is simply to disable screensaver in pause mode.

 

I didnt even know replacing the SS images was possible lol.

Also as someone with an OLED, wouldn't disabling mean the image I paused on remains on the screen and as such would cause potential burn in issues if I left on pause for extended period?

 

Why pause for a long period?.. just stop it and let the bookmark feature start you up where you were. I use Pause for literally just momentary issues of less than a minute.. If I am going to be longer than that.. I just stop.

 

No, it means when you select the update icon on your player, you long press the icon to clear the cache. Generally, it's related to most update failures.
If you want to switch your G version firmware to a higher version without G, it can be done directly with a local firmware package.

 

I would have made the assumption that most people would not make any changes. The images are nice enough to keep and even though there are only a few, they serve the purpose of protecting OLED screens from having image retention issues due to static content being displayed for too long.

I would be happy if there was a very simple screen blanker mode that only puts up a black or 20% gray solid overlay on the screen. Keep the video image as is underneath and only use the OSD overlay to cover up the image. It could even use some level of alpha channel mixing to let a tiny amount of the paused image show through. That ought to preserve the resolution, frame rate, bit depth and everything else, thus avoiding all these problems. It does not seem like it would be terribly hard to do.

Because you may not know in advance how long you are going to be pausing for. What you think will be a brief distraction, like a child asking a question, may turn into a task that keeps you away from the TV for significant amount of time.

Observation: There are lot of people on this forum who tell others how to use or not use their Zidoo. "Don't leave it on all the time", "Don't pause for more than a minute", "Don't insert bootable USB sticks", etc. This is a consumer electronics device. There will be many, many use case scenarios from many different people. The goal should be to continuously improve the device so that it works for everyone. While tips that help people work around bugs are very much welcome, we all need to realise that everyone will behave differently when it comes to using their device. Same as everyone will have it connected to different A/V equipment and use it in different sized rooms in different viewing and listening conditions. We all want it to work for us in the way that makes us happy - no one wants to change their habits because they have a new toy.

 

Good to know!!

 

I'm sorry, I finished watching the movie and now I can't re-produce it. If it happens again I'll make a video of it.