Zidoo 8K Media Players FAQ

QUESTION: could not find doing search, so pardon the newbie question:
What is best way to wipe the poster wall, etc., to "zero it out"
- while not having to redo all the main "settings" for the UHD8000 ?

Basically, after having to clean house on my hard drive and reorder stuff, and now that I know how to get episode ISO archives to work for TV shows, and also to "date" movie files properly to avoid broken auto-match (think "Invasion (2005)" (ABC) vs "Invasion (2021) (Apple)" or two different Walter Mitty movies, different editions of "Girl with Dragon Tattoo" etc.). Best option is to go back and rescan from scratch.

Thanks

 

When you go to your library selection screen and press the menu button you have a choice to update that library source or to drop all the entries and scan again from scratch. That should do the trick.

 

HT5/Settings/Library/Clear Data > Clear

 

Thanks folks!

 

A complete clear of the database will certainly give you a fresh start, but it will also lose a couple of settings. You might want to go to settings and check, before you scan your library. From memory, it defaults the location for the downloaded posters to be something that I found undesirable. I think it litters each library with a .HomeTheater directory and writes the Cache, Posters, Logos, etc. into that directory. I want all this to always go to storage://

 

Thanks. I think I have it set to dump stuff like backups and local posters into /archive but right now my movie, music, tv, documentary folders are littered with all the poster and fan art images and random nfo files I did not make. So, good tip to double check that before rescan. Going to see if I can do a "clear all" -- then shut down, then reboot *then* do a test scan on a folder to see if all is working like I want to. Figuring out that the zidoo can supposedly read the .vob files inside of series dvd iso discs, if I pull them out and rename them was a major light bulb over my head (all those FRINGE and TORCHWOOD box set DVDs were seriously messing with my mind, and the wall of "unmatched" was dizzying!).

From the first scan-a-roo, rematching series like Invasion (ABC) didn't work as the scan matching to the Apple version but then left out several episodes and refresh didn't sort/fix that. Learning experience. I am probably going to be able to post a serious "sticky worthy" post on dealing with "series" imports by the time I'm done redoing this.

Appreciate all the help and pointers, folks.

 

The default location has been changed to local storage in the latest HT

 

Awesome on being able to choose location

DOUBLE CHECK ME ON MULTIDISC NAMING, PLEASE:
(going through all my multi-discs and double checking prior to rescan)

Folder/Southland Tales (2006)
SOUTHLAND TALES (2006).(1#Theatrical).iso
SOUTHLAND TALES (2006).(2#CANNES).iso

Folder/DOGMA (1999)
DOGMA (1999).(1#Movie).iso
DOGMA (1999).(2#EXTRAS).iso

Folder/Prometheus (2012)
Prometheus (2012).(1#Theatrical Version).iso
Prometheus (2012).(2#Workprint Edition).mkv
Prometheus (2012).(3#Paradise).mp4
Prometheus (2012).(4#Derelict).mp4

Folder/REANIMATOR (1985)
REANIMATOR (1985).(1#DVD Version).iso
REANIMATOR (1985).(2#4K AI Version).iso

Am I doing that correctly for proper scanning/intake and groupings?

I'm moving all my multi-disc stuff into its own main "movies multidisc" folder, separate from standalone "movies" ISOs.

Thanks folks! Just trying to pre-heat my drive before putting back inthe UHD8000, doing the 'clear' thing, then rescanning after I install the new HT5/Alpha.

 

You've always been able to choose the location, it's just the default location was always set to the source location rather than the box itself which was, in my opinion, problematic.

Yes, the naming looks spot on.

You may want to change a REANIMATOR to Re-Animator. To be fair, it'd probably work, but I always like to keep the movie name exactly as in the TMDB listing (barring illegal characters like : ? * etc).

 

Thanks, and giood catch on Reanimator - just noted that also for some other things like Kick-arm.with hyphen

Have a lot of old ISOs from my HTPC which were ripped decade or more ago, so going through everything title by title.

Doing that with browser window open to check "actual" title.

And yes, all my posters did get shared locally with the last HT5 version with TMDB fix.

Chris

 

Any chance of a setting either via a command line code, snippet, or gui/web setting to increase the compression level of downloaded images? A lot of the poster images that are 1.6mb could be 1.1mb and look the same, and the 256kb images could be 178k and look the same. It really adds up for series where we have downloaded primary art, fan art, poster, etc. I can see this taking up 1TB of a 24TB drive easily.

For example if the read/write of images is set at 80% compression/quality, lowering that to 60% would look the same and save huge amount of space.

Or an "app" to scan and compress all .jpg files?

Really noticing this while migrating stuff from a ExFAT drive that macOS seems to have corrupted (sigh), and moving to NTFS drive that only Win11 will touch before going back into the box.

 

I think the vast majority of users would not want that or would not care. I don't think it's going to be a problem. I also don't see the auxiliary images taking up 1TB of space for 22TB of movies or TV shows.
If it really bothers you, it should be simple enough for you to run something like ImageMagick on the directory and re-compress the images to suit your needs. No need for feature creep in the firmware.

I have a nice 77" OLED TV. Images with JPEG compression set to 60% would look terrible. Even at 80%, you'll get a lot of visible compression artifacts. Are you sure you want to go down that path? Dial-up modem levels of image compression on a UHD, 8k HDR capable player?

 

So, you either do not know or disagree ...cool.
You are correct, 10,000 x 1 mb does not equal 1 tb.

I will look into offline solution to properly optimize images. Taking image from 1.629MB to 1.04MB is not visually notable, even on 4K display. Smaller images would also speed up the on screen draw perhaps (seems logical, don't know how caching/render done) by 20%.

Just asking as it's a hella lotta images, and they could be smaller and better optimized.

For 8k the larger previews make sense, less so for 4k.

 

As I mentioned, ImageMagick is an appropriate tool for doing this in bulk.
The core command will boil down to magick convert -quality 65

Here's a more detailed answer generated by Gemini. I have not tested the code, but the bash script looks good to me at a first glance, although it's more complicated and verbose than what I would write. I have no idea about the Powershell script as I use bash even on Windows. It ought to get the job done.

There are probably GUI front-ends for ImageMagick that can do batch processing for you. I prefer scripts.

 

Thanks. I have many tools to bulk compress, but they do not do nested folders inside folders, only a single "directory" at a time, hence the query about setting a default compression factor "at the root" when the files are first downloaded and written, just as they can be done on a web server when generating thumbs, etc. And would not need to swap drives in/out for the process, hence the query. If the box is not doing optimization when downloading and just writing the "as found" file, then there is no local setting. If the box is downloading and optimizing to, say, 80% quality; was just looking to see if there is hook/hack to change that just a little bit further. If not, no worries. If somebody knows of an in built hook for this, would be appreciated.

Wasn't so much issue with movies, but man, I have a *lot* of series, and the older shows had 22 eps per season not 6-10 like these days.

Peace out.

 

I for one would absolutely not want the box to recompress already compressed JPGs for display on a 4K UI.

 

Yep. When re-compressing images that use lossy compression you'll get concatenation errors, where the compression artifacts introduced at one stage are propagated and magnified at further stages downstream, thus degrading picture quality more than if you started from the uncompressed image and went straight to the final compression level.

Anyway, I checked and (as expected) the downloaded files are unaltered, other than the file name. The MD5 and SHA checksums match the files at TMDB - I checked a number of files.

 

Thanks for the feedback folks. In further investigation, "most" files are downloaded fine. It's only a few outliers where the background image is up to 2MB and doesn't need to be. For instance the "backing" image for Netflix "3 Body Problem" is 1.8MB and not needed that size for something blurred and sublimated in the interface anyway. So, "whew."

I was not looking to recompress everything, only concerned if there was a setting where a certain amount of compression was being applied on "first write" to the box, then having toggle for "amount" would have been helpful.

Turns out to be non issue. I've been an imaging pro most of my life, and Photoshop guru since 1993, so kinda sensitive to "hey, that file is way to big for what it is."

All good!

 

The flip side of this is "you can't get the quality back". From my point of view, you can always buy more storage, but you can not faithfully restore detail that has been lost. As with most things, trade-offs need to be made.

 

Totally. I'm still kinda freaked out I'm putting two 24TB drives in a media player.
Old enough to remember a $700 10MB external drive for my Atari 1040ST