I received my Z1000Pro yesterday and with the help of Zidoo tech support I installed the "G" firmware. I then added several playback apps; VLC, CnX, UPlayer, KMPlayer, MX Player and Kodi. What I want to do is playback 4K downloaded files from YouTube, a few of which have HDR. The apps I tried presented mixed results. VLC plays the non-HDR 4K files perfectly, but does not pass HDR thru the Z1000Pro. None of the other apps would play HDR. I read that CnX supports HDR natively but I never could get it to work. After searching for files, it would show where the files are stored but would bomb out when I selected anything to play. It is possible that the software I used for batch downloading from YouTube, StreamFab, does not support HDR? Anyone have an answer? I posted a question about that to DVDFab and will post what they say. Any other suggestions for HDR playback? I concur that there are not many HDR videos on YouTube but it sure would be nice to have playback of those I download and save. Thanks!
With the greatest of respect, I think you've completely missed the point of this box. Not really sure why you downloaded any apps - this is a dedicated media player and not your typical Android box and as such has its own hardware player. If you don't want yo use HT to catalog your library just open the files in Media Center and they'll use the Zidoo player and play perfectly in whatever mode they were encoded (assuming they are supported, and most are). My honest advice is delete any apps you've downloaded and preferably factory reset and just play the files from Media Center.
Thanks for the reply. Before I added any apps, when the box was "factory fresh" I tried playing several of the downloaded files. In every case "Can't play video" popped up on screen even before the file began loading. At that time, I contacted Zidoo tech who advised trying various apps. For whatever reason, the built in media player will not play any of the downloaded YouTube files. I don't think I have missed the point of this box. I have tens of thousands of recorded TV shows in .TS and .MP4 format, stored on a NAS, that I had been using a Netgear NeoTV 550 as a player. I considered the Z1000Pro to be a worthwhile update to the old tech Netgear player. Playback of downloaded YouTube files is an incidental use of this device.
Ah - from your post I thought the Youtube stuff was of primary concern - Are these AV1 streams? In that case they are not supported by the Zidoo player.
MP4 is a just a container for audio and video - If you use MediaInfo you can see what the Video Codec is for the video stream, for example:
That'll be the problem - that's one of Google's own codecs and not supported by the Realtek SOC. It's the predecessor to AV1 I mentioned earlier.
That's too bad. At least the VLC app will play them. I gave up on HDR playback of the downloaded YouTube files. No big deal and I can always watch HDR on my FireTV.
You can transcode the files so they will playback in HDR on the Zidoo. I have transcoded some similar files for playback on an Amlogic S922x box, but the same files play in HDR on Zidoo as well. I downloaded in webm format, then used ffmpeg: ffmpeg -i filename.webm -c:a copy -c:v libx265 -tag:v hvc1 -crf 18 -pix_fmt yuv420p10le -x265-params "colorprim=bt2020:transfer=smpte2084:colormatrix=bt2020nc" filename.mkv
I would recommend installing ZDMC (a Kodi fork from Zidoo). It will play what it can using the inbuilt Zidoo player (great DV and HDR, 4K, 1080p etc) and can default to using Kodi player if it needs for older and some non-standard stuff. As you are a DVDFab user, you can simply transcode any of those problem YouTube files to HEVC/H265 codecs (mkv or mp4). Speed (including batch processing) will depend on the speed and age of your CPU and GPU on the computer (I use Nvidia CUDA processing for much great speed) and bitrate quality chosen from the settings.
I found a fix for playback of downloaded YouTube 4K videos using the native Z1000 Pro player. YTD Video Downloader downloads files that do play using the native Zidoo player. The downloads are MP4 container. The Pro version of YTD will batch download entire YouTube channels. Quality looks fine but I have not directly compared that playback to VLC. But the convenience of using the native player is a big plus. Note that downloaded HDR files still won't play with HDR but at least this fix works for most of the 4K YouTube downloads.
Correction: YTD Pro Downloader will batch download all files in each playlist, not the entire channel as I said above. The Pro version is licensed for one computer only.
